by Steven Brust
I left at the end of the first act. Loiosh didn’t mind. He didn’t think the actor playing the Warlord should have been allowed out of North Hill. He’s a real snob when it comes to theater. He said, “The Warlord is supposed to be a Dragon, boss. Dragons stomp, they don’t skulk. And he almost tripped over his sword three times. And when he was supposed to be demanding that more troops be conscripted, it sounded as if he was asking for—”
“Which one was the Warlord?”
He said, “Oh. Never mind.”
I walked home slowly, hoping someone would do something to me so I could do something back, but all was quiet in Adrilankha. At one point someone approached me as if he were going to pull on my cloak and I started to get ready for action, but he turned out to be an old, old man, probably an Orca, who was under the influence of something. Before he could open his mouth I asked him if he had any spare copper. He looked confused so I patted his shoulder and walked on.
When we got back, I hung up my cloak, took off my boots and checked the bedroom. Cawti was home and asleep. Rocza was resting in her alcove.
I stood over Cawti, hoping she’d wake up and see me looking at her and ask what was wrong so I could storm at her and she’d apologize and everything would be fine. I stood there for what must have been ten minutes. I might still be standing there, but Loiosh was around. He wasn’t saying anything, but he makes me self-conscious about wallowing in self-pity for more than ten minutes at a time, so I undressed and crawled into bed next to Cawti. She didn’t wake up. A long, long time later I fell asleep.
* * *
I wake up slowly.
Oh, not always. I remember a couple of times when I’ve woken to Loiosh screaming in my mind and found myself in the middle of a fight. Once or twice I was woken up badly and unfortunate things almost happened, but those are rare. Usually there is a time between awake and asleep that, in retrospect, feels like it lasts for hours. That’s when I clutch at my pillow and wonder if I really feel like getting up. Then I roll over, look at the ceiling and the thoughts of what I’m going to do that day trickle into my head. That’s what really wakes me up. I’ve tried to organize my life so that there is something to get up for on any given day. Today we’re going to the Eastern section for the spice markets. Today I’m going to close that deal on a new brothel. Today I’m going to visit Castle Black and check on Morrolan’s security setup and chat with Aliera. Today I’m going to follow this guy and confirm that he does visit his mistress every other day. That kind of thing.
When I woke up the next morning, I learned that I was made of better stuff than I had thought, because I got out of bed without having a single reason to. Not one damned reason. Cawti was up, but I didn’t know if she was home or not; neither thought gave me any impulse to see the world outside of my room. My business was running itself; I had no obligations to fulfill. The only thing interesting in my life was finding out the story behind who had killed the Easterner, and that was for Cawti, who seemed not to care.
But I made it into the kitchen to start heating water. Cawti was in the living room reading a tabloid. I felt a tightening in my throat. I started the water, then went into the bathroom. I used the chamber pot and cleaned it with sorcery. Neat. Efficient. Just like a Dragaeran. I shaved in cold water. My grandfather shaved in cold water (before he grew his beard) because he says it makes you better able to stand the winters. That sounds like nonsense to me, but I do it out of respect for him. I chewed on a tooth stick, rubbed down my gums, and rinsed my mouth out. By then the water was hot enough for my bath. I took it, dried myself, cleaned up the bathroom, dressed, and dumped the water out the back. Splash. I stood and watched the puddles and rivers it made running down the alley. I’ve often wondered why no one claims to read the future in dumped bath water. I looked to the left and saw the ground was dry beneath my neighbor’s back porch. Ha! I was up earlier than she again. So there, world. One small victory.
I walked into the living room and sat down in my chair, facing the couch. I caught a glimpse of a headline on Cawti’s tabloid that read, “Call for the investigation—” on about four lines of big black print, and that wasn’t the whole thing. She put the thing down and looked at me.
I said, “I’m mad at you.”
She said, “I know. Should we go out and eat?”
I nodded. For some reason, we can’t seem to discuss things at home. We went to our favorite klava hole with Loiosh and Rocza on my shoulders and I ignored the tension and twisting in my stomach long enough to order a few eggs and drink some klava with very little honey. Cawti ordered tea.
She said, “Okay. Why are you mad?” which is like getting in the first cut to put the other guy on the defensive.
So I said, “Why didn’t you tell me where you were?”
She said, “Why did you want to know?” with a bit of a smile as we realized what we were doing.
I said, “Why shouldn’t I?” and we both grinned, and I felt just a little better for just a little while.
Then she shook her head and said, “When you asked where I was and when I’d be back, it sounded as if you wanted to approve or disapprove of it.”
I felt my head snap back. “That’s absurd,” I said. “I just wanted to know where you were.”
She glared at me. “All right, so I’m absurd. That still doesn’t give you the right—”
“Dammit, I didn’t say you were absurd and you know it. You’re accusing me—”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything. I said how I felt.”
“Well, by saying that you felt that way, you were implying that—”
“This is ridiculous.”
Which was the perfect chance to say, “All right, so I’m ridiculous,” but I know better. Instead, I said, “Look, I was not then trying, nor have I ever tried, to dictate your actions. I came home, you weren’t there—”
“Oh, and this is the first time that’s happened?”
“Yes,” I said, which we both knew wasn’t true, but the word came out before I could stop it. The corner of her mouth twitched up and the eyebrow lowered, which is one of my favorite things that she does. “All right,” I said. “But I was worried about you.”
“About me?” she said. “Or afraid that I was involved in something you don’t approve of?”
“I already know you’re involved in something I don’t approve of.”
“Why don’t you approve of it?”
I said, “Because it’s stupid, first of all. How are five Easterners and a Teckla going to ‘destroy the despotism’ of an Empire? And—”
“There are more. That’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
I stopped. “What’s an iceberg?”
“Ummm . . . I don’t know. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. The thing is, it’s not even nearing a Teckla reign. I could see something like this if the Teckla were near the top of the Cycle, but they’re not. It’s the Phoenix, and then the Dragons if we’re still alive when the Cycle changes; the Teckla aren’t even in the running.
“And in the second place, what’s wrong with what we have now? Of course it isn’t perfect, but we live well enough and we got it on our own. You’re talking about giving up our careers, our life-style, and everything else. And for what? So a bunch of nobodies can pretend they’re important—”
“Careful,” she said.
I stopped in mid-diatribe. “All right,” I said. “Sorry. But have I answered your question?”
She was quiet for a long time, then. Our food showed up and we ate it without saying anything at all. When we’d turned the scraps over to Loiosh and Rocza, Cawti said, “Vladimir, we’ve always agreed never to hit each other’s weak spots, right?”
I felt a sinking sensation when she said that, but I nodded.
She continued, “All right, this is going to sound like that’s what I’m doing, but I don’t mean it that way, okay?”
“Go on,” I said.
She shook her head. “Is it okay? I want to
say it, because I think it’s important, but I don’t want you to just shut me out, the way you do whenever I try to get you to look at yourself. So will you listen?”
I drained my klava, signaled the waiter for more and doctored it appropriately when it came. “All right,” I said.
“Until just recently,” she began, “you thought that you had found your line of work because you hated Dragaerans. Killing them was your way of getting back at them for what they’d put you through while you were growing up. Right?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she continued. “A few weeks ago, you had a talk with Aliera.”
I winced. “Yeah,” I said.
“She told you about a previous life in which—”
“Yeah, I know. I was a Dragaeran.”
“And you said you felt as if your whole life had been a lie.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Hm?”
“Why did it shake you so much?”
“I don’t—”
“Could it be because you’ve felt all along as if you had to justify yourself? Could it be that somewhere, deep down, you think it is evil to kill people for money?”
“Not people,” I said by reflex. “Dragaerans.”
“People,” she said. “And I think you’ve just proved my point. You were forced into this line of work, just the way I was. You had to justify it to yourself. You’ve justified it so thoroughly that you kept on doing ‘work’ even after you no longer had to, when you were making enough money from running your area that the ‘work’ was pointless. And then your justification fell apart. So now you don’t know where you stand, and you have to wonder whether you are, really, deep down, a bad person.”
“I don’t—”
“Let me finish. What I’m getting at is this: No, you aren’t a bad person. You have done what you had to do to live and to help provide us both with a home and a comfortable life. But tell me this, now that you can’t hide behind hating Dragaerans anymore: What kind of Empire do we have that forces someone like you to do what you do, just to live, and to be able to walk down the streets without flinching? What kind of Empire not only produces the Jhereg, but allows it to thrive? Can you justify that?”
I let her comments percolate through me for a while. I got more klava. Then I said, “That’s the way things are. Even if these people you’re running around with aren’t just nut cases, nothing they do is going to change that. Put in a different Emperor and things will just go back to being the way they are in a few years. Sooner than that, if it’s an Easterner.”
“That,” she said, “is a whole ’nother subject. The point I’m making is that you’re going to have to come to terms with what you do, at whose expense you live, and why. I’ll help as much as I can, but it is your own life you have to deal with.”
I stared into my klava cup. Nothing in it made anything any clearer.
After another cup or two I said, “All right, but you still haven’t told me where you were.”
She said, “I was conducting a class.”
“A class? On what?”
“Reading. For a group of Easterners and Teckla.”
I stared at her. “My wife, the teacher.”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry.”
Then I said, “How long have you been doing this?”
“I just started.”
“Oh. Well.” I cleared my throat. “How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“Oh.” Then another, nastier thought occurred to me. “Why is it only now that you’ve started doing this?”
“Someone had to take over for Franz,” she said, confirming exactly what I was afraid of.
“I see. Has it occurred to you that this may be what he’d been doing that someone didn’t like? That this was why he was killed?”
She looked straight at me. “Yes.”
A chill spread along my backbone. “So you’re asking—”
“I’m not Franz.”
“Anyone can be killed, Cawti. As long as someone is willing to pay a professional—and it’s clear that someone is—anyone can be killed. You know that.”
“Yes,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“No what?”
“Don’t. Don’t make me choose—”
“I am choosing.”
“I can’t let you walk into a situation where you’re a helpless target.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I can. I don’t know how yet, but I can.”
“If you do, I’ll leave you.”
“You won’t have that choice if you’re dead.”
She paused to wipe up the klava that had spilled from my cup. “We are not helpless, you know. We have support.”
“Of Easterners. Of Teckla.”
“It is the Teckla who feed everyone else.”
“I know. And I know what happens to them when they try to do anything about it. There have been revolts, you know. There has never been a successful one except during the reign of the Orca, right before the Teckla. As I said, we aren’t there now.”
“We’re not discussing a Teckla revolt. We’re not talking about a Teckla reign; we’re talking about breaking the Cycle itself.”
“Adron tried that once; remember? He destroyed a city and caused an interregnum that lasted more than two hundred years, and it still didn’t work.”
“We aren’t doing it with pre-Empire sorcery, or magic of any kind. We’re doing it with the strength of the masses—the ones who have the real power.”
I withheld my opinion of what real power is and who has it. I said, “I can’t allow you to be killed, Cawti. I just can’t.”
“The best way to protect me would be to join us. We could use—”
“Words,” I said. “Nothing but words.”
“Yes,” said Cawti. “Words from the minds and hearts of thinking human beings. There is no more powerful force in the world, nor a better weapon, once they are applied.”
“Pretty,” I said. “But I can’t accept it.”
“You’ll have to. Or, at least, you’ll have to confront it.”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking. We didn’t say anymore, but before we left the klava hole I knew what I was going to have to do. Cawti wasn’t going to like it.
But then, neither was I.
4
I pr grey trousers: remove blood stain from upper rt leg . . .
JUST IN CASE I haven’t made it clear yet, the walk over to the Easterners’ section takes a good two hours. I was getting sick of it. Or maybe not. Now that I think back on it, I could have teleported in three seconds, then spent fifteen or twenty minutes throwing up or wishing I could. So I guess maybe I wanted the time to walk and think. But I remember thinking that I was spending altogether too much time just walking back and forth between the Malak Circle district and South Adrilankha.
But I made it there. I entered the building and stood outside the doorway, which now had a curtain. I remembered not to clap, and I didn’t feel like pounding on the wall, so I called out, “Is anyone in there?”
There was a sound of footsteps, the curtain moved and I was looking at my friend Gregory. Sheryl was behind him, watching me. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was in the room. Since it was Gregory who was standing there, I brushed past him and said, “Is Kelly around?”
“Come right in,” said Sheryl. I felt a little embarrassed. No one else was in the room. In one corner was a tall stack of tabloids, the same one Cawti had been reading.
Gregory said, “Why do you want to see him?”
“I plan to leave all my worldly wealth to the biggest idiot I can find and I wanted to interview him to see if he qualified. But now that I’ve met you, I can see there’s no point in looking any further.”
He glared at me. Sheryl laughed a little and Gregory flushed.
Kelly appeared through the curtain then. I looked at him more closely than I had before. He really was quite overw
eight, as well as short, but I somehow wanted to call him extremely chubby instead of fat. Cute, sort of. His forehead was flat, giving the impression that his head was large. His hair was cut very short, like half an inch, and he had no sideburns at all. His eyes had two positions, narrowed and squinting, and he had a very expressive mouth, probably because of the amount of fat surrounding it. He struck me as one of those people who can turn from cheerful to vicious in an instant; like Glowbug, say.
He said, “Right. Come on.” Then he turned and walked toward the rear of the flat, leaving me to follow him. I wondered if that was a deliberate ploy.
The back room was narrow and stuffy and smelled of pipe smoke, although Kelly didn’t have the teeth of a smoker. Come to think of it, he probably didn’t have any vices at all. Except overeating, anyway. Shame he was an Easterner. Dragaerans can use sorcery to remove excess fat; Easterners tend to kill themselves trying. There were rows of leather-bound books and all around the room, with black or sometimes brown bindings. I couldn’t read any of the titles, but the author of one of them was Padraic Kelly.
He nodded me into a stiff wooden chair and sat in another one behind a rickety-looking desk. I pointed to the book and said, “You wrote that?”
He followed my pointing finger. “Yes.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a history of the uprising of two twenty-one.”
“Where was that?”
He looked at me closely, as if to see if I were joking, then said, “Right here, in South Adrilankha.”
I said, “Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Do you read poetry as well?”
“Yes,” he said.
I sighed to myself. I didn’t really want to walk in and start haranguing him, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot else to talk about. What’s the use? I said, “Cawti’s been telling me something about what you do.” He nodded, waiting. “I don’t like it,” I said, and his eyes narrowed. “I’m not happy that Cawti’s involved.” He kept staring at me, not saying anything.