by Steven Brust
My arm was around Cawti’s shoulder, her head on my chest. I enjoyed the sensation, but I was curious about the voices. Moving as carefully as I could, I succeeded in not waking her up. I dressed carefully, making sure nothing clinked.
Meanwhile, the voices had been growing gradually louder. As soon as I felt dangerous again I opened the door, and identified Aliera’s voice, although I still couldn’t distinguish the words. The dark stone walls of the hallway greeted me; the air was cold and dank, the hallway high and wide. I thought back to my first visit to Dzur Mountain and shuddered. I turned toward the voices. I identified the other voice as Morrolan’s. As I approached, he was speaking.
“ . . . you say may be true, but that hardly makes it any of our affair.”
“Any of our affair? Whose is it then? I—there! You see? You’ve woken up one of my patients.”
“It is just as well,” countered Morrolan, nodding to me. “You have exhausted all of my patience.”
I was in a long room, dimly lit and filled with books. There were several chairs nearby, all done in black leather, but they were empty. Morrolan and Aliera stood facing each other. Morrolan’s arms were crossed on his chest; Aliera’s hands were on her hips. As she turned to me, I saw that her eyes, normally green, had turned blue. This is as much of a danger sign as the stiffening of a dragon’s neck tentacles. I found a chair and sat down, to ease the pain a bit. This looked like it was going to be a good one.
Aliera snorted at his comment and turned back. “Ha! It’s your own fault if you can’t see the obvious. What’s the matter, isn’t it subtle enough for you?”
“If there was anything to see,” he parried, “I would doubtless have seen it long before you.”
Aliera pressed the attack. “If you had the sense of honor of a teckla. you’d see it as clearly as I do.”
“And had you the eyesight of a teckla, you would be able to see what does and does not concern us.”
This forced Aliera into a parry. “How could it not concern us? A Dragon is a Dragon. Only this one happens to be a Jhereg. I want to find out why, and so should you.”
Morrolan gestured toward me with his head. “Have you met Vlad’s assistant, Kragar? He’s as much of a Dragon—”
She snorted again. “That snake? He was thrown out of the House, as you well know.”
“Perhaps so was—”
“If so,” she stop thrust, “we’ll find out, and then why.”
“Why don’t you simply ask her?”
“She’d never tell me, you know that. She won’t even admit that she is a Dragon, much less—”
Morrolan snorted and tried a fancy maneuver, saying, “You know quite well that your only interest in this is to find someone else to be heir.”
“So what? What have my motives to do with—”
“Aliera!” said Morrolan suddenly. “Perhaps we should ask Sethra.”
She stopped and cocked her head to the side. “Ye-e-ess. An excellent idea. Why don’t we? Perhaps she can talk some sense into your head.”
He sidestepped that. “Let’s go see her, then.” He turned to me. “We’ll be back shortly.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll stay here and clean up the blood.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
They vanished. I stood up painfully and made my way back to the Dag—to Cawti’s room. Cawti. I let the name roll around in my head. CAW-ti. Cawwww-tiii. Cawti. A good, Eastern name. I started to open the door, stopped, and clapped softly.
“Who is it?” came from inside.
“Your victim,” I said.
“Which one?”
“Funny, funny.”
“Come in,” she said. “At your own risk.”
I slipped inside. “Good morning.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“It occurs to me that you didn’t kill me last night.”
“Oh, but I did,” she said. “Six times. But I lost count and revivified you seven times.”
I sat down on the bed next to her. She still hadn’t dressed. I ignored the dryness in my mouth. “Oh. I must have forgotten.”
“You could have killed me, too, you know.” Her voice was suddenly serious.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “But you knew I wouldn’t. I had no such knowledge of you.”
“I’ll take your word for that.” She laughed lightly. I put her laugh, with her shrug, on the list of things I wanted to make her do more often. The candle sputtered, so I rummaged around until I found a few more, and lit them all with the remaining stub. I returned to the bed and tapped her side lightly. She moved closer to the wall and I lay down. She rested her head on my arm.
There were a few pleasant minutes of silence, then I said, “I overheard an interesting conversation just now.”
“Oh?”
“Concerning your partner.”
She tensed. “What about her?”
I described the conversation. She pulled away from me, leaning on her arm to watch me as I spoke. Her brows were drawn together as she listened. She looked very beautiful that way, too.
I finished the tale, and said, “Is she a Dragonlord?”
Cawti shook her head. “That isn’t my secret to tell.”
“Okay. You look worried.”
She smiled a little and put her head back on my chest. “For an assassin, you’re quite sensitive, Lord Taltos.”
“In the first place, I’m not an assassin—you’ve been listening to too many rumors about me. In the second, the same goes for you, doubled. And in the third, isn’t ‘Lord Taltos’ a bit out of place, all things considered?”
She chuckled. “As you wish, Vlad. Vladimir.” She repeated it, slowly. “Vladimir. VLA-di-meer. Vlaaaadimeer. Vladimir. I like it. A good Eastern name.”
“Shit,” I said. “Help me off with this damned jerkin, will you? And careful not to stab yourself . . . ”
* * * *
Some time later, while engaged in serious snuggling, I said, “Morrolan and Aliera are liable to check up on your partner, you know.”
“Mmmmm. They won’t find anything.”
“Don’t be too sure, Cawti. They’ve surprised me before.”
She tsked. “Shouldn’t let yourself be surprised, Vladimir.”
I snorted, and withheld a few remarks. “I’m serious. They’re bound to find out something. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but you ought to think about it. Have you been in touch with her?”
“Of course.”
“Then warn her—”
“Why do you care?”
“Huh? I don’t know. Jhereg are Jhereg, I guess. You aren’t a threat to me anymore, and I don’t see why they should be meddling. Or Aliera, rather. Morrolan doesn’t see why, either.”
“Mmmmmm.”
I shrugged, causing her head to bounce on my chest. She giggled, which amazed and delighted me no end. Have you ever met an assassin who giggled? The absurdity of the whole situation was—
I decided that I had to get out of there. I sat up, dislodging her. “I’m going to check on our hosts and see what they’re doing now.”
“Like hell you are, my love. What’s really bothering you?”
“What did you call me?”
She sat up too, the bedclothes falling to her waist. She glared. “Don’t start getting mushy with me, you murdering Easterner.”
“What did you call me?”
“A murdering Easterner.”
“Yes, dear, and so are you. I meant before that.”
“Vladimir . . . ”
“Oh, Deathsgate. I’m getting out of here.” I dressed quickly and stepped into the hall, using all of my willpower to avoid looking back at her. I returned to my room, favoring my injured side, and collapsed on the bed. Loiosh gave me a good chewing out (literally) for deserting him, after which I got in touch with Kragar.
“What’s new?” I asked him.
“I have some information about the Phoenix Guards—they weren’t just withdrawn in th
e area around where the job was done, they were taken out of the whole area. They’re gone.”
“Great. Well, I’m pleased they aren’t around, but I wonder what it means. Any ideas?”
“No.”
“Okay. I want you to try to find out something for me.”
“Sure. What?”
“Everything you can on the Sword of the Jhereg.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Do you think it’s likely to be?”
“Fine. I’ll get back to you in a hundred years or so. Vlad, how am I—”
“She was once a Dragonlord; that should help. She was probably expelled.”
“Wonderful. Should I try to bribe a Lyorn or a Dragon?”
“The Lyorn would be safer, but the Dragon is more likely to help.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“I know. I wasn’t.”
He sighed telepathically. “I’ll see what I can do. Would you mind telling me what we’re doing this for?”
That was a tricky one. I didn’t feel like telling him that his boss had become infatuated with his own executioner. “Oh,” I told him, “I’m sure you can figure it out if you really work at it.”
Silence, then: “You want to find out if there was anything shady in her expulsion, so you can clear her and have her owe you a favor, and then turn her back on Laris. Right? Not bad.”
Hmmmm. Not bad at all. “Clever,” I told him. It was clever. I’d have to give him a bonus, if it worked out. “Now, get on it.” I broke the contact. I stretched out on the bed. After all of this, I really did need to sleep. I also needed to get my emotions under control.
* * * *
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that my side and back didn’t hurt so much. Also, I actually felt refreshed. I lay there for a few minutes, just breathing and enjoying it, then forced myself to get up. In addition to feeling refreshed, I also felt filthy from sleeping in my clothes. I stripped and found a tub of water in the corner, did a quick spell to heat it, and washed. As I did this, I managed to put Cawti out of my mind, at least for a little while, and concentrate on my real problem—Laris.
The idea Kragar had had wasn’t bad at all, but it depended on too many things that were outside of my control. Still, it was worth checking into. Also worth checking into was the question of why the Phoenix Guards had chosen that moment to leave. How could he have arranged that? Where had the orders come from?
I snapped my fingers, getting soapy water in my eye. That question, at least, I could get answered. I concentrated on a certain Tsalmoth, who worked for Morrolan and reported directly to me—
“Who is it?” said Fentor.
“Vlad.”
“Oh! Yes, milord?”
“We need some information . . . ” I explained what I was after, and he agreed to check into it. I broke the contact and chatted with Loiosh while I finished up my bath. I looked disgustedly at my filthy clothes, shrugged, and started to put them on again.
“Check the dressing table, boss.”
“Eh?”
But I did, then smiled. Aliera had been thorough. I donned the change of clothes happily, then stepped out into the hall with Loiosh riding on my right shoulder. It seemed as if I were beginning to get things done. Good. I wandered down to the library, found it empty, and took the stairs up to where the dining room and various sitting rooms were.
The next thing, I decided, was to see if I could get more information from whoever it was that had tipped Kragar off about the assassination. The fact that we’d actually learned something from him was a very good sign. My biggest problem was still lack of information, and this could mean we were starting to solve it. I thought about getting in touch with Kragar again to ask him to work on that more, but decided against it. As they say: if you have someone stand for you, don’t jog his sword arm while he does.
I found Morrolan and Aliera in the first sitting room I came to, along with Sethra. Sethra Lavode: tall, pale, undead, and faintly vampiric. I’d heard her age placed at anything from ten to twenty thousand years, which is a significant portion of the age of the Empire itself. She dressed in and surrounded herself with black, the color of sorcery. She lived in Dzur Mountain; maybe she was Dzur Mountain, for there are no records of a time when she, or someone of her family, didn’t live there. Dzur Mountain was its own mystery, and not subject to being understood by one such as me. The same may be said of Sethra.
Physically, though, she had the high, thin features of the House of the Dragon. The upward slant of her eyes and the unusually extreme point to her ears made one think of Dzurlords. There had been rumors that she was half Dzur herself, but I doubted them.
To Sethra, even more than to most Dragaerans, an Easterner’s lifetime was a blink of an eye. Maybe that’s why she was so tolerant of me. (Morrolan’s tolerance was due to having lived among Easterners for many years of his youth, during the Interregnum. Aliera’s tolerance I’ve never understood; I suspect she was just being polite to Morrolan.) Most Dragaerans had heard of Sethra Lavode, but few had met her. She was periodically considered a hero, and had been Warlord of the Empire (while she was still living) and Captain of the Lavodes (when there were still Lavodes). At other times, such as the present, she was considered an evil enchantress and Dzurlord bait. Periodically, some fledgling hero would go up the Mountain to destroy her. She turned them into jhegaala or yendi and sent them back. I’d told her that this wasn’t going to help, but she just smiled.
At her side was the dagger called Iceflame, which was sort of Dzur Mountain in hand, or something. I don’t know enough about it to say more, and thinking about it makes me nervous.
I bowed to each of them, and said, “Thank you for the sanctuary, Sethra.”
“It’s no trouble, Vlad,” she responded. “I enjoy your company. I’m pleased to see that you’re recovering.”
“So am I.” I sat down, then asked, “What can you fine specimens of Dragonhood tell me about the Phoenix Guard?”
Morrolan arched an eyebrow. “What did you wish to know? Is it your desire to join?”
“Could I?”
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that your species is against you there.”
“But not my House?”
He looked startled and glanced at Aliera.
She said, “A Jhereg could join if he wanted to. There have been some, I think—none who are actually a part of the business end, I suppose, but some who’ve bought Jhereg titles instead of being Houseless.”
I nodded. “So it isn’t all Dragons, eh? That’s what I was wondering about.”
“Oh, no,” said Aliera. “It’s mostly Dragons, because all Dragons must serve periodically, but there are others from every House in the guards—except Athyra, who are never interested, and Phoenix, because there aren’t enough of them.”
“Suppose some colonel of some army of Dragonlords is serving. Would he be a colonel in the guards?”
“No,” said Sethra. “Rank among the guards has nothing to do with any other rank. Officers in private armies often serve under their own blademen.”
“I see. Does this ever cause problems?”
“No,” said Aliera.
“Why the interest?” asked Sethra.
“I’m bothered by the fact that the guards who were enforcing the Imperial Edict left just at the right time for our friends to nail me. I can’t believe it was coincidence.”
They looked at each other. “I can’t think of any way,” said Sethra.
“Whose decision would it have been? The Empress’s? Or whoever leads the guards?”
“The Empress sent them; she would have had to order their withdrawal,” said Aliera. Morrolan nodded.
“All right,” I said, “I don’t think she would have been involved in this on purpose, would she?” Three heads shook. “Then is there anyone who could have made the suggestion to her that ‘now would be a good time,’ and be confident that she’d act on it at once?”
Sethra and Alier
a looked at Morrolan, who was at court more often than they. He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Her lover,” he said, “is said to be an Easterner. I’ve never met him, but he might have such influence. Then there are her advisors, but, to be candid, she hardly listens to most of them. I believe that she listens seriously to me, but I could be deluding myself. And, in any case, I made no such request of her. She pays attention to Sethra the Younger, but Sethra has no interest in anything save invasion plans for the East.”
Sethra Lavode nodded. “It’s good to have an ambition,” she said. “Sethra the Younger is the only apprentice I’ve ever had who’s never tried to kill me.”
I turned back to Morrolan. “You can’t think of anyone else?”
“Not at present.”
“All right then, what else? A faked message, maybe? Do this right now, signed so-and-so?”
“Who,” said Morrolan, “would write a message rather than reach her psionically?”
“Well, someone she doesn’t speak with often. It must be hard to reach her directly, so—”
“No it isn’t,” said Aliera, looking at me as if puzzled.
“It isn’t?”
“Of course not. Any citizen can reach Zerika through his link. Didn’t you know that?”
“No . . . but she must get thousands of people—”
“Not really,” she said. “If she doesn’t consider it worth her time, she destroys the person. This keeps the amount of contact down quite a bit.”
“Oh . . . My father never saw fit to mention that. I guess he was afraid I might do it. In any case, I still don’t see who could and would have convinced her to withdraw the troops. Morrolan, you’re well respected around court. Will you try to find out for me?”
“No,” said Morrolan. “As I have explained to you, I will have nothing to do with any Jhereg war, directly or indirectly.”
“Yeah, okay.” I was pleased to see Aliera shoot him a brief look of disgust. It occurred to me then that the easiest thing to do would be to create something real that would make the Empress want to pull the troops out. What could it be? Civil disturbance? Threat of an invasion of some sort?
“Kragar.”
“Yes, Vlad?”
“See if there was anything going on in the city that would have called for Phoenix Guards to handle.”