Orca Read online

  “You sure?”

  “Who can be sure of anything? I didn’t want him dead. I don’t know anyone who wanted him dead. The Empire sent their best investigators, and they think it was an accident.”

  “All right,” I said. “What was he like?”

  “You think I knew him?”

  “You lent him money, or at least thought about it; you knew him.”

  He smiled, then the smile went away and he looked thoughtful—an expression I doubt most people would ever have seen. “He was all surface, you know?”

  “No.”

  “It was like he made himself act the way he thought he should—you could never get past it.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  He ignored that. “He tried to be polished, professional, calculating—he wanted you to believe he was the perfect bourgeois. And he wanted to impress you—he always wanted to impress you.”

  “With how rich he was?”

  Stony nodded. “Yeah, that. And with all the people he knew, and with how good he was at what he did. I think that part of it—being impressive—was more important to him than the money.”

  I nodded encouragingly. He smiled. “You want more?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’d better know why.”

  “It’s a little embarrassing,” I said.

  “Embarrassing?” He looked at me the way I must have been looking at Vlad when I realized that he was embarrassed.

  “I have this friend—”

  “Right.”

  I laughed. “Okay, skip it. I owe someone a favor,” I amended untruthfully. “She’s an old woman who is about to be kicked off her land because everybody is selling off everything to stave off surrender of debts because of this mess with Fyres.”

  “An old woman being foreclosed on? Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Would I make up something like that?”

  He shook his head, chuckling to himself. “No, I suppose not. So what do you plan to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet. Just find out what I can and then think about it.” Or, at any rate, if Vlad had had any other plan, he hadn’t mentioned it to me. “What else can you tell me?”

  “Well, he was about fourteen hundred years old. No one heard of him before the Interregnum, but he rose pretty quickly after it ended.”

  “How quickly?”

  “He was a very wealthy man by the end of the first century.”

  “That is quick.”

  “Yeah. And then he lost it all forty or fifty years later.”

  “Lost it all?”

  “Yep.”

  “And came back?”

  “Twice more. Each time bigger, each time the collapse was worse.”

  “Same problem? Same sort of paper castles?”

  “Yep.”

  “Shipping?”

  “Yep. And shipbuilding. Those have been his foundations all along.”

  “You’d think people would learn.”

  “Is there an implied criticism there, Kiera?” His look got just the least bit hard.

  “No. Curiosity. I know you aren’t stupid. Most of the people he’d be borrowing from aren’t, either. How did he do it?”

  Stony relaxed. “You’d have to have seen him work.”

  “What do you mean? Good salesman?”

  “That, and more. Even when he was down, you’d never know it. Of course, when someone that rich goes down, it doesn’t have much effect on how he lives—he’ll still have his mansion, and he’ll still be at all the clubs, and he’ll still have his private boat and his big carriages.”

  “Sure.”

  “So he’d trade on those things. You get to talking with him for five minutes, and you forget that he’d just taken a fall. And then his secretaries would keep running in with papers for him to sign, or with questions about some big deal or another, and it looked like he was on top of the world.” Stony shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered if he didn’t have those secretaries pull that sort of thing just to look good; but it worked. You’d always end up convinced that he was in some sort of great position and you might as well jump on the horse and ride it yourself before someone else did.”

  “And there were a lot of us on the horse.”

  “A lot of Jhereg? Yeah.”

  “And in deep.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That isn’t good for my investigation.”

  “You worried you might bump into the Organization? Is that it?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “It might happen,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “What if it does?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to see you get hurt, Kiera.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “How far beyond Northport does this thing go?”

  “Hard to say. It’s all centered here, but he’d begun spreading out. He has offices other places, of course—you have to if you’re in shipping. But I can’t say how much else.”

  “What was going on before he died?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have the impression things were getting shaky for him.”

  “Very. He was scrabbling. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but there were rumors that he’d stepped too far out and it was all going to crumble.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Still wondering if someone put a shine on him?”

  “Seems like quite a coincidence.”

  “I know. But I don’t think so. As I said, I never heard any whispers, and the Empire investigated; they’re awfully good at this sort of thing.”

  I nodded. That much was certainly true. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem. If there’s anything else, let me know.”

  “I will.” I stood up.

  “Oh, by the way.”

  “Yes?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Seen anything of that Easterner you used to hang around with?”

  “You mean Vlad Taltos? The guy who screwed up the Organization representative to the Empire? The guy everyone wants to put over the Falls? The guy with so much gold on his head that his hair is sparkling? The guy the Organization wants so bad that anyone seen with him is likely to disappear for a long session of question and answer with the best information-extraction specialists the Organization can find? Him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Nope.”

  “I hadn’t thought so. See you around, Kiera.”

  “See you around, Stony.”

  Chapter Four

  My first step was to fill Vlad in on what I’d learned; but I took a long, circuitous route back just in case I was being followed, so it took me almost until evening to get back to the cottage. When I turned the last corner of the path, Vlad was waiting for me, on the path, about fifty meters from the cottage. That startled me just a bit, as I’m not used to being seen so quickly even when I’m not trying to sneak, until I realized that Loiosh must have spotted me. I must remember to be careful if I ever have to sneak up on that Easterner.

  He stood clothed only in pants and boots, his upper body naked and full of curly hairs, and he was sweating heavily, although he didn’t seem to be breathing hard.

  “Nice evening,” I told him.

  He nodded.

  I said, “What have you been doing?”

  “Practicing,” he said, pointing at a tree some distance away. I noticed several knives sticking out of it. Then he touched his rapier, sheathed at his side, and said, “I’ve also punctured my shadow several times.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Only when I missed.”

  “Did it get any cuts in?”

  “No. But almost.”

  “Good to see you’re keeping your hand in.”

  “Actually, I haven’t been lately, but I thought it might be time to again.”
/>   “Hranun.”

  “Besides, I needed to get out.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s ugly in there,” he said, gesturing toward the cottage.

  “Oh?” I said again.

  “The old woman is doing what she promised.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “He’s all screwed up.”

  “That’s news?”

  Vlad looked at me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “He keeps thinking he killed his sister, or he has to save her, or something.”

  “Sister?”

  “Yeah, she was involved, too. He feels guilty about her.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, he’s a Teckla, and Loraan was his lord, and if you’re a peasant, you don’t do what he did. Deathgate, Kiera. Even touching a Morganti weapon—”

  “Right.”

  “So if he didn’t kill Loraan, he must have killed his sister.”

  I said, “I don’t follow that.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” said Vlad. “But that’s what we’re seeing. Or what we think we’re seeing. It isn’t too clear, and we’ve been doing a lot of guesswork, but that’s how it looks at the moment. And then there’s the bash on the head.”

  “What did that do?”

  “She thinks there may be a partial memory loss that’s contributing to the whole thing.”

  “Better and better.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know. The old woman thinks we have to find some way of communicating with him, but she doesn’t know how.”

  “Does he hear us when we talk? See us?”

  “Oh, sure. But we’re like dream images, so what we say isn’t important.”

  “What is important? I mean, she probed him, right? What’s he doing in there?”

  He shrugged. “Trying to keep his sister away from me, or away from Loraan, or something like that.”

  “A constant nightmare.”

  “Right.”

  “Ugly.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, anyway.”

  “If you could go in there yourself, I mean, into his mind—”

  “Sure, I’d do it. In a minute.”

  I nodded. “Then I might as well tell you what I learned today.”

  “Do.”

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” He put his shirt on and nodded to me and I told him. He was a good listener; he stood completely still, leaning against a tree; his only motion was to nod slightly every once in a while; and he was spare with his questions, just asking me to amplify a point every now and then. Loiosh settled on his left shoulder, and even the jhereg appeared to be listening. It’s always nice to have an audience.

  When I was finished, Vlad said, “Well. That’s interesting. Surprising, too.”

  “That the Organization is involved?”

  “No, no. Not that.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head and appeared to be lost in thought—like I’d told him more than I thought I had, which was certainly possible. So I gave him a decent interval, then said, “What is it?”

  He shook his head again. I felt a little irritated but I didn’t say anything. He said, “It doesn’t make sense, that’s all.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “How well do you know Stony?”

  “Quite.”

  “Would he lie to you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Maybe that’s it, then. In any case, someone lied, somewhere along the line.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me think about this, all right? And do some checking on my own. I want to follow something up; I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  I shrugged. There’s no reasoning with Vlad when he gets a mood on him. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  He nodded. Then he said, “Kiera?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I slept late the next day, because there was no reason not to. It was around noon when I got to the cottage, and no one was there except the dog. It shuffled away from me. I devoted some effort to making friends with it, and of course I succeeded. I talked to it for a while. Most cat owners talk to their cats, but all dog owners talk to their dogs; I don’t now why that is.

  I’d been there an hour or so when the dog jumped up suddenly and bolted out the door, and a minute or so later Hwdf’rjaanci returned with Savn. I said, “Good day, Mother. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in. I’ve made some klava.”

  She nodded and had the boy sit down, then she closed the shutters. I realized that each time I’d been there during the day the windows had been shut. I got her some klava, which she drank bitter.

  I said, “What have you learned, Mother?”

  “Not as much as I wish,” she said. I waited. She said, “I think the two biggest problems are the bump on the head and the sister.”

  “Can’t the bump be healed?”

  “It has healed, on the outside. But there was some damage to his brain.”

  “No, I mean, can’t the damage be healed? I know there are sorcerers—”

  “Not yet. Not until I’m sure that, if I heal him, I won’t be sealing in the problem.”

  “I think I understand. What about the sister?”

  “He feels guilty about her—about her being exposed to whatever it was that happened.”

  She nodded. “That’s the real problem. I think he’s somehow using guilt about his sister to keep from facing that. He creates fantasies of rescuing her, but always shies away from what he’s rescuing her from. And then he loses control of the fantasies and they turn into nightmares. It’s worse, I think, because he used to be apprenticed to a physicker, so he’s even more tormented about what he did than most peasant boys would be.”

  I nodded. Speaking like this, she’d changed somehow—she wasn’t an old woman in a cottage full of ugly polished wood carvings, she was a sorcerer and a skilled physicker of the mind. It now seemed entirely reasonable that, as Vlad had told me, the locals would come by from time to time to consult with her on whatever their problems might be.

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “No. There’s too much I don’t understand. If I just go blundering in, I might destroy him—and myself.”

  “I understand.” I opened my mouth and closed it again. I said, “What are the walks for?”

  “I think he’s used to walking. He gets restless when he’s sitting for too long.”

  “And the closed shutters? Are they for him, or do you just like it that way?”

  “For him. He’s had too much experience, there have been too many things for him to see and hear and feel all at once—I want to limit them.”

  “Limit them? But if he’s trapped in his head, won’t it help to give him things outside his head to respond to?”

  “You’d think so, and you may even turn out to be right. But more often than not, it works best the other way. It’s as if he’s trying to escape from pressure, and everything he perceives adds to the pressure. If I was more certain, I’d create a field around him that shut him off from the world entirely. It may yet come to that.”

  “You’ve had cases like this before?”

  “You mean people who were so pulled into themselves that they were out of touch with the world? Yes, a few. Some of them worse than Savn.”

  “Were you able to help them?”

  “There were two I was able to help. Three I couldn’t.” Her voice was carefully neutral.

  One way of looking at it was that the odds were against success. Another way was that she was due to win one. Neither was terribly productive, so I said, “How did you proceed?”

  “I tri
ed to learn as much as I could about how they got that way, I healed any physical damage when there was some, and then, when I thought they were ready, I took them on a dreamwalk.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know about dreamwalking?”

  “Yes. What sort of dreams did you give them?”

  “I tried to guide them through whatever choice they made that put them in a place they couldn’t get out of, and give them another choice instead.”

  “And in three cases it didn’t work.”

  “Yes. In at least one of those, it was because I didn’t know enough when I went in.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “It was. I almost lost my mind, and the patient became worse. He lost the ability to eat or drink, even with assistance, and he soon died.”

  I kept my face expressionless, which took some effort. What a horrible way to die, and what a horrible knowledge to cany around with you, if you were the one who had tried to cure him. “What had happened to him?”

  “He’d been badly beaten by robbers.”

  “I see.” I almost asked the next obvious question, but then I decided not to. “That must not be an easy thing to live with.”

  “Better for me than for him.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said, thinking of Deathgate Falls.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “In any case, I understand why you want to be careful.”

  “Yes.”

  She went over and sat down in front of Savn once again, staring at him and holding his shoulders. In a little while she said, “He seems to be a nice young man, somewhere inside. I think you’d like him.”

  “I probably would,” I said. “I like most people.”

  “Even the ones you steal from?”

  “Especially the ones I steal from.”

  She didn’t laugh. Instead she said, “How do you know I won’t turn you over to the Empire?”

  That startled me, although I don’t know why it should have. “Will you?” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me that.”

  She shook her head. “You aren’t a killer,” she said.

  “You know that?”

  “Yes.” She added, “The other one, the Easterner, he’s a killer.”

  I shrugged. “What could you tell the Empire, anyway? That I’m a thief? They know that; they’ve heard of me. That I stole something? They’ll ask what I stole. You’ll tell them, by which time Vlad will have hidden it, or maybe even returned it. Then what? Do you expect them to be grateful?”