The Book of Athyra Read online

  “Why do you think?”

  “You don’t want to be seen with me?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “Well, in any case, our disguises match.” He was referring to the fact that I was wearing a green blouse and white pants, rather than the same black and grey he’d once worn. My hair was also different—I’d brushed it forward to conceal my noble’s point so I’d look more like a peasant. But perhaps he didn’t notice that; for an assassin, he can be amazingly unobservant sometimes. Still, you wear a disguise, first, from the inside, and perhaps that can in part explain the fact that my disguise didn’t fool Vlad; I’ve always trusted him, even before I had reason to.

  “It’s been a long time, Vlad,” I said, because I knew that to him, who could only expect to live sixty or seventy years, it would have seemed like a long time.

  “Yes, it has,” he agreed. “How odd that we should just happen to run into each other.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “There’s less of me,” he said, holding up his left hand and showing me that the last finger was missing.

  “What happened?”

  “A very heavy weight.”

  I winced in sympathy. “Is there someplace we can talk?” I said.

  He looked around. We were in Northport, quite a distance from Adrilankha, but it was the same ocean, and the docks, if older, were pretty much the same. There was a small, two-masted cargo ship unloading about fifty yards away, and there was a fishermen’s market nearby; between them, on the very edge of the ocean, we were in plain view of hundreds of people, but no one was near us. “What’s wrong with here?”

  “You don’t trust me,” I said, feeling a bit hurt.

  I could see a snappy answer get as far as his teeth and stop there. Vlad and I had a great deal of history; none of it should have given him any reason to be suspicious of me. “Last I heard,” he said, “the Organization wanted very badly to kill me; you still work for the Organization. Excuse me if I’m a bit jumpy.”

  “Oh, yes,” I agreed. “They want you very badly indeed.”

  The water lapped and gurgled against the dock that had stood since the end of the Interregnum; I could feel the spells that kept the wood from rotting. The air was thick with the smell of ocean: salt water and dead fish; I’ve never really liked either.

  “Who is the boy?” I asked him, as much to give him time to think as because I wanted to know. Savn, as Vlad had called him, seemed to be a handsome Teckla youth, probably not more than ninety years old. He still had that look of strength and energy that begins to diminish during one’s second century, and his hair was the same dusky brown as his eyes. It annoyed me that I could conceive of him as a catamite. He still hadn’t responded to me or to anything else.

  “A debt of honor,” said Vlad, in the tone he uses when he is trying to be ironic. I realized that I’d missed him. I waited for him to continue. He said, “Savn was damaged, I guess you’d say, saving my life.”

  “Damaged?”

  “Oh, the usual—he used a Morganti weapon to kill an undead wizard.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year. Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I’m glad you got my message, and I’m glad you came.”

  “You’re still psychically invisible, you know.”

  “I know. Phoenix Stone.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is Aibynn?”

  Aibynn was one of the last people Vlad wanted to ask about; he knew it and I knew it. “Fine as far as I know. I don’t see him much.”

  He nodded. We watched the bay for a while, but it didn’t do much. I turned back to Vlad and said, “Well? I’m here. What is it?”

  He smiled. “Maybe I’ve come up with a way to get the Organization to forgive and forget.”

  I laughed. “My dear Vlad, if you managed to loot the Dragon Treasury to the last orb and deposited it all at the feet of the Council they wouldn’t forgive you.”

  His smile disappeared. “There’s that.”

  “Well then?”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. That was all right, I can be a very patient woman. “You know,” I said, “there aren’t all that many Easterners who walk around with a pair of jhereg on their shoulders; are you quite certain you aren’t too conspicuous?”

  “Yeah. No professional would try anything in a place like this, and any amateur who wants to is welcome to take a shot. And by the time word gets around so someone who knows his business can set up something, I’ll be gone.”

  “But they’ll know where you are.”

  “I don’t plan on being here for more than a few days.”

  I nodded.

  He said hesitantly, “Any news from home?”

  “None I can tell you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re asking about Cawti.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ve promised not to say anything except that she’s fine.”

  “Oh.” I watched his mind work, but he didn’t say anything else. I very badly wanted to tell him what was going on, but a promise is a promise, even to a thief. Especially to a thief.

  I said, “How have you been getting by?”

  “It’s been harder since I acquired the boy, but I’ve managed.”

  “How?”

  “I mostly stay away from towns, and you know the forests are filled with bandits of one sort or another.”

  “You’ve become one?”

  “No, I rob them.”

  I laughed. “That sounds like you.”

  “It’s a living.”

  “That sounds like you, too.”

  He shifted his weight as if his feet were causing him pain; it made me think about the amount of walking he must have been doing in these past three years and more. I said, “Do you want to sit down?”

  “You don’t miss much,” he said. “No, I’m fine. Ever heard of a man named Fyres?”

  “Yes. He died a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Other than that, what do you know about him?”

  “He had a great deal of money.”

  “Yes. What else?”

  “He was, what, a baron? House of the, uh, Chreotha?”

  “Orca.”

  “All right. Then that tells you what I know about him.”

  Vlad didn’t answer, which meant that I was supposed to ask him a question. I thought over a number of things I’d have liked to know, then settled on, “How did he die?”

  “They’ve found no evidence of murder.”

  “That’s not—Wait. You?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”

  “All right,” I said. Vlad has always had the ability to make me believe him, even though I know what a liar he is. “Then what do you think happened?”

  His eyes were in constant motion, and the jhereg, too, never stopped looking around. “I don’t know,” he said, “and I have to find out.”

  “Why?”

  For just an instant he looked embarrassed, and “Oh ho!” passed through my head, but I sent it on its way—Vlad could be embarrassed by the oddest things. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let me tell you what I’d like you to do.”

  “I’m listening.”

  One thing I like about Vlad is that he understands details. He not only gave me every detail of every alarm I was likely to encounter but also told me how he found out, so I could do my own checking. He told me where the stuff was likely to be and why he thought so, and the other places it might be located if he was wrong. He gave me the schedules of the patrols in the area and explained exactly what he hadn’t been able to discover. It took about an hour, at the end of which time I knew the job would be well within my capabilities—not that there are many jobs that aren’t, if they involve stealing.

  I said, “There will be a price.”

  “Of course,” he said, trying to hide that I’d hurt his feelings.


  “You have to tell me why you want it.”

  He bit his lip and looked at me carefully; I kept my face expressionless, because I didn’t want him learning too much. He nodded abruptly, and the deal was made.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ME TWO days to check everything Vlad had told me—two days that I spent working out of a reasonably comfortable room in a hotel in the middle of Northport; on the third I went to work. The place I was to burgle was situated a couple of miles east of Northport, and the walk there was the most chancy part of the operation—if anyone saw me and saw through my disguise as easily as Vlad had, it would arouse curiosity, and that would lead to investigations and that would lead to this and that. I solved the problem by staying off the roads and sticking as much as I could to the thin-wooded areas to the side. I didn’t get lost, but it was several hours before I reached the bottom of a small hill, with Fyres’s mansion looming above me.

  I spent a couple of hours walking a wide circuit around it, taking a long, slow look at the place. One of the things Vlad hadn’t given me was a set of blueprints, but with this newer work you can almost create the inside by seeing the outside; for some reason post-Interregnum architects object to having rooms without windows, which means the dimensions indicate the layout. You can also identify windowed corridors because (again, I don’t know why) the windows are invariably smaller than those in rooms. By the time I’d finished my walk, I pretty much knew what it looked like, and I’d found the most obvious places for an office.

  I spent the last hours of daylight watching for any signs of activity. There were none, which was as it should be—Fyres’s family (a wife and three children) didn’t live there, his mistress had abandoned the place, the staff were, no doubt, ensconced within, and all of the remaining protection was sorcerous and automatic. I took out a few of the devices I use to identify such things and set to work.

  Darkness came as it always does, with shadows becoming dusk—shadows that were a bit sharper here than in Adrilankha, I suppose because the westerly winds thin out the overcast, so the Furnace is more apparent. Everything is brighter in the west of the Empire, as it is in the far east; all of which makes the darkness seem even darker.

  The protections weren’t bad, but not as thorough as I would have expected. The first was very general and nearly useless—all you had to do was pretend you belonged there and it would let you burn down the place without raising a fuss. The recognition spell was only marginally trickier, requiring me to cause it to bend around and past me; but there was no spell monitoring whether the recognition spell was being bent, so, really, they might as well not have bothered with it. There were the usual integrity detectors on the doors and windows, but these are easily defeated by transferring the one you want to pass to another door or window. These, in fact, did have monitor spells to watch for just this, but they’d been cast almost as an afterthought and without anything to let the security people know the monitor had been removed—I could take it down just by identifying the energy committed to that spell and absorbing it into a working of my own.

  I considered the significance of how poorly the mansion was protected. It might mean that since the place was abandoned and its owner was dead, no one felt the need to use high-level protections. It might also mean that the Orca weren’t as sophisticated as the Jhereg. Or it might mean that there were some traps concealed that I hadn’t found yet. That possibility was worth an extra hour of checking, and I took it.

  I went through enough gear to stock a small sorcery shop and found fertility spells that had probably been placed on the ground before the mansion was built, spells that kept the latrines from smelling, spells that kept the mansion from sinking into the ground, spells that kept the stonework from crumbling, and spells to make the row of rednut trees that flanked the road grow just so—but nothing else that had anything to do with security. I even used a blue stone I’d picked from the pocket of Vlad’s friend Aliera, but the only signs of elder sorcery were distant echoes from the explosion that had dissolved Dragaera City at the start of the Interregnum.

  I was satisfied. I climbed the hill slowly, keeping my eyes open for more mundane traps, although I didn’t expect to find any, and I didn’t. I eventually reached the edge of the mansion, which, I suppose I should have mentioned, demonstrated the sort of post-Interregnum aesthetic that thinks monoliths attractive for their own sake, producing big blocks of stone with the occasional bit of decoration, usually a wrought-iron animal, sticking out as an afterthought. Buildings like this are exceedingly easy to burglarize, because you know exactly where everything is relative to everything else, and because the regularity of the construction makes those who live there believe that it is difficult to conceal oneself while climbing up a wall, which is silly—I once challenged three friends to try to spot me while I scaled three stories of a blank wall, after telling them which wall I was going up and when I was going to do it. They couldn’t find me. So much for the difficulty of concealment.

  It took me about ten seconds to levitate up to the level of the window; I rested on the ledge and considered that idiotic spell I already mentioned that was supposed to make certain the integrity of the window wasn’t broken. There was, indeed, nothing fancy about it, but I was careful and spent some time circumventing the alarm. The window, by the way, was filled in, as were all of them, with a solid sheet of glass cunningly worked into slots in a wood and leather contrivance that, in turn, fitted snugly into the window; a silly luxury that would need to be replaced in a hundred years or so, even if the fragile thing weren’t broken in the meantime.

  I broke it carefully, first covering it with a large sheet of paper smeared with an extremely tacky gel and then pushing slowly until the glass gave and the shards stuck to the paper rather than falling and making noise. There were jagged bits of the stuff all around the wooden frame so I had to be careful entering the room, but I was able to enter without cutting myself; then I hung the paper in the window where the glass had been so I could illuminate the room without the light appearing to anyone outside (if there was, by chance, someone outside).

  I used another several seconds sensing for spells in the room, then lit a candle, squinted against the glare, and glanced around quickly. No matter how many times you’ve been through this, you always half expect to see someone sitting in the room waiting for you with all sorts of arguments to hand. It has never happened, and it didn’t this time, but it’s one of those things that pass through your mind.

  I closed my eyes and stood very still for a while, listening for anyone moving around and for whatever creaks and groans might be usual for this building. After a minute, I opened my eyes and took a good look.

  Office or study, said that part of my brain that wants to rush in and categorize before all of the details are individually assimilated. I let it have its way, ignored its opinion, and made some mental notes.

  The room was dominated by two large cabinets against the far wall, both of some dark wood, probably cherry, and showing signs of careful but uninspired construction. In front of them was a small desk, facing the room’s other window, with a chair behind it. From the chair, the occupant, presumably Fyres, could reach back to either cabinet. On top of the desk were a set of books that would probably reward some study, several sheets of paper, blotter, inkwell, and quill; several other quills were all set in a row to one side, as if awaiting their call. The desk and the room were neither unusually tidy nor remarkably messy, except for between one and four weeks’ worth of dust over everything, which would be about right if no one had been in here since his death. Why would no one have been in his office since his death? No, questions later.

  I checked all the desk drawers and cabinets and found both sorcerous alarms on each. None of them were terribly complicated and I wasn’t in a big hurry, so I took my time disabling them (unnecessarily in all probability—they were almost certainly keyed directly to Fyres, who wouldn’t be receiving any messages—but it is always best to be certain). I
also looked for more mundane sorts of alarms—easily identified by thin wires hidden against desk legs or along walls—but there weren’t any. It occurs to me now, as I relate this, that it may seem as if Fyres took insufficient precautions against theft, and I ought to correct this impression; most of his precautions probably involved guards, and, chances are, the guard schedule had been obliterated with Fyres’s life. And the magical alarms were really quite good; it’s just that I’m better.

  It took maybe two minutes to assure myself that there were no secret drawers in the desk, another ten to be certain about the cabinets. The rest of the room took an hour, which is a long time to be on the scene, but I didn’t think the risk was too great.

  Once I was certain I hadn’t missed anything, I began going through his papers, looking for anything that seemed like what Vlad was after. The longer I sat there, the harder it was to make myself go slowly and be careful not to miss anything, but, after four hours or so, I was pretty sure I had the information. It made a neat little bundle, which I tied up and slung over my back. I still had an hour or so before dawn.

  I restored order to the papers and books I’d messed up, then slipped across the hall to the master bedroom. Everything was very still, and I could hear—or maybe I just imagined it—servants breathing from their quarters above me. The bed was made, the clothes were neatly arranged in the wardrobe, and, unlike the office, everything was freshly dusted—obviously the staff had been given orders to stay out of the other room, and they were still scrupulously following them. I opened drawers and scattered things about as if a thief had been looking for valuables. I did, in fact, find a safe, so I spent a few minutes marking it up as if I’d attempted to open it, then I went back to the study, out the window, and down.

  I was back in town before the first light. I found my hotel and climbed into my second-story window so I wouldn’t have to go past the desk clerk. I put the booty under my pillow and slept for nine hours.

  * * *

  MY RENDEZVOUS WITH VLAD took place in one of those dockside inns that feature thick beer and harshly spiced fish stew. Vlad availed himself of the latter; I abstained. It was too early in the day for there to be much business; only a table or two was filled. Neither of us attracted much attention. I’ve always wondered how Vlad (even with a jhereg on his shoulder—only one today) managed to avoid making himself conspicuous wherever he went.