Vallista--A Novel of Vlad Taltos Read online

  He nodded. “Maybe we should find a more comfortable place to talk.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He led me back toward the stairs.

  “As you have surmised,” he said. “It has to do with necromancy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And my Lord Zhayin said that the breakthrough came when he was able to reach the Halls of Judgment.”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  Discaru shrugged. “If you want a guess, because the Halls are a nexus of worlds.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Actually, sarcasm aside, I had a pretty good idea what it meant. I said, “I need to check something. This goal—a building that permits one to reach other worlds—has been around for a long time, and Zhayin was the first to achieve it, right?”

  We stopped in front of the left-hand door. He turned the handle and nodded. “How did you know that? The ghost again?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a mystery here.”

  “Hey, you think?”

  He opened the door, stepped through the doorway, and vanished.

  I couldn’t see much of anything through the door; it was black, except for what I can only describe as a few vague shapes that could have been rocks, trees, mountains, clouds, animals, or people. I stood there for maybe five seconds, trying to decide what to do, when Discaru appeared again.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I guess that might have caught you off guard. Did you want to come along?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Paths of the Dead, of course. Or, rather, the Halls of Judgment.”

  “Of course,” I said. “So, you were just kidding about going somewhere we could sit?”

  “Oh, no. We can sit there. By the fountains. It’s quite comfortable, actually.”

  “But your point isn’t the comfort, it’s bringing me to the Paths.”

  “You said you wanted to understand the manor, and how it works. Well, the entrance to the Halls is the key.”

  I had Lady Teldra, Loiosh, Rocza, and a few other sharp things. Sorcery couldn’t affect me. So, how bad could the trap be? Plenty.

  “Um. All right. Sure. Lead the way.”

  “Boss—”

  “Got a better way to get answers?”

  “But—”

  “And it isn’t like I haven’t been there before.”

  “Yeah, I remember. That’s not an argument for going.”

  “Probably not,” I said, and followed Discaru through the door.

  Like I told Loiosh, we’d been here before.

  There’s this mountain located, I don’t know, somewhere way north and a bit east of Adrilankha, where there’s a stream or a river that goes over a cliff, which is where Dragaerans, if they’re considered worthy by some standard I couldn’t even guess at, are sent over because Dragaerans think that sending a corpse down a waterfall to go smashing itself at the bottom of a cliff shows respect. Don’t ask me. Not my custom, not my waterfall.

  Point being, the place is full of dead people, most of them trying to find their way to the Halls of Judgment, or wandering around aimlessly after failing to do so. From things Sethra Lavode and the Necromancer have said, I get the feeling that the region full of dead people has about the same relationship to the strange area around the Halls as some bucket of water pulled out of the ocean-sea has to do with the whole.

  I’d been there once years before, when I’d been too stupid to know better. Now I was much more clever and sophisticated, so everything would be fine. Right?

  Having run a good number of Shereba games, and played in many, I can tell you that there’s a certain type of player who makes a careful study of the strategy of the game, and then as soon as he sits down, thinks to himself, I know so much more about the game than these people. Like, I know why sloughing the low trump here is a stupid play, and because I know that, it gives me an edge over people who do it out of stupidity, so in my case it’s a smart play. Then they slough the low trump just like the stupid player and lose their money. I’m not kidding. There’s one of those guys in every game you sit down at. If you can’t find him, it’s probably you.

  I bring this up because, well, here I was, back in the Halls of Judgment, but I knew it was stupid to be here, so that made it smart. Right? In fact, I figured I had a good chance of being okay as long as I didn’t run into a god or something.

  I looked around. Light in the Paths of the Dead is weird; there’s no Enclouding like you have in the Empire, but there’s also no Furnace lurking behind it, so where does the light come from? I dunno, but whatever it is leaves the place feeling just a bit too dark, like a room where you can manage to read but you really wish for one more lamp. My memories of the Halls of Judgment involved thrones and pillars and darkness. Wherever I was now was a lot more interesting. There were trees that looked remarkably like trees—the tall kind that have branches only near the top, and have wide leaves that flop down at night. I’d seen a lot of them in the west. The grass was short and tended, and there were stone benches surrounding a fountain. I like fountains. This one was formed of three rings, where each ring had small arcs of water all around it. In the middle of each ring, a tall jet formed the petals of a flower, and in the middle a third jet of water rose higher still, splitting into three parts and then dissolving into mist with a shimmering rainbow in it. I’d seen rainbows in the East, and I’d always thought it had something to do with the Furnace being right there where you could see it, but I guess not. Or, you know, magic. It’s hard to form conclusions in the Halls of Judgment; in that sense it’s like Precipice Manor. So far, my conclusions had not gone beyond deciding that dead people like looking at fountains, too.

  Discaru and I were in a clearing that might have been fifty yards in diameter, and beyond it was mist. I turned back to the fountain and watched it for a moment more before it crossed my mind to look behind me.

  “Where’s the door?”

  Discaru glanced over his shoulder. “These two rocks. Just turn around and take a step and we’ll be back. Try it, if you’d like.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “What is this place?”

  “The Halls of Judgment.”

  “Thought so. What’s beyond the mist?”

  “Whatever you want, in a way, up to a point.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “You want to know about how Precipice Manor does what it does. It’s because of this connection, where we’re standing. So I brought you.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  There were several indistinct shapes on the far side of the fountain. “Who are they?”

  “Let’s go see,” he said.

  I walked around it, slowly, because I wanted to keep watching it. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by water in motion, but I am. I’ve wasted more time than I care to admit just watching waves crash in from the ocean-sea.

  There turned out to be four people—figures, I should say, because I don’t know if “people” is a good description for disembodied souls—standing and watching the fountain, another three seated on one of the benches. They looked like Dragaerans to me, but whether they were, or whether my brain was interpreting disembodied souls in the only way it could, I can’t say. Judging from the last time I’d come this way, things worked best if I just treated them as if what I was seeing were real. I also caught sight of a few figures wearing purple robes walking past in various directions. I hadn’t forgotten about them since I’d seen them last—I couldn’t forget them—but I tried not to think about them.

  I got close to the ones watching the fountain, and identified an Issola and two Dragonlords. I’d run into a lot of Dragonlords last time I was here, and I hadn’t liked any of them. To the left, I’d liked all of the Issolas I’d met, so I thought maybe I’d say hello to this one, who was a broad-shouldered fellow with heavy brows and a tall forehead. As I got close to him,
he glanced up at me, then turned his attention back to the fountain. I got the feeling he didn’t care to be interrupted, so I stopped and just watched the water some more.

  Morrolan has a fountain in his courtyard, and a small one in a room just opposite the stairway up to the tower with the windows. I asked him how it was done once, and he taught me the spell and said now I could make one of my own. I never had, but during those years when I dreamed of a castle I’d thought about it, and even sort of designed it in my head. It would have been tall, with water shooting high, high up, in thin jets in all directions, and back into a granite pool that would swirl rightwise. It would have been a great fountain. I didn’t build it, though, because I didn’t get the castle, because Cawti sort of went through some changes in what she wanted, and then I got some people mad at me and I’ve been too busy running for my life to do much of anything else.

  The Issola stood up, bowed his head to me, and walked away. Discaru had come up next to me. “What is this thing?”

  “Memory,” he said.

  “Huh. Looks like water.”

  “Well, it’s that too.”

  “Memory is water? Water is memory? Memory is like water? Water is—”

  “You don’t have to complicate it so much. This is where souls come to recover their memories.”

  “Souls forget?”

  “Those who became Purple Robes.”

  “Oh. So, since I haven’t lost my memories, it shouldn’t have much of an effect on me, right?”

  I turned back to the fountain, watching an isolated jet rise, curve, turn into mist. It was pretty, the nice rainbow forming and wavering in, well, wherever the light was coming from. Jets dissolving into mist into rainbows, and so back into the pool, and up into jets.

  * * *

  Have you ever drunk so much that you don’t remember what you did? That there are hours where you know you were up, awake, doing something, but you don’t have the least clue what it was? I’ve only had that happen once.

  It was a bad time for me. I was still married then, but things had come up with Cawti, and we couldn’t even see each other without starting in on all the ugly stuff. One day, in the middle of it, I went out and got a bottle of the worst Fenarian brandy I could find and brought it home. Cawti wasn’t there—she usually wasn’t in those days, being busy making things better for everyone who didn’t care about her, and worse for everyone who did. So I just started drinking.

  At some point, Cawti came home, looked at me, started to say something, then shook her head. She started to walk past me. I said, “You killed me.” Forming words was hard.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  I picked up the bottle and looked at what was left.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you still killed me. I mean, before. They gave you money and you killed me.”

  She nodded. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “You know I never killed another human. Never.”

  “I know. We’ve talked about it bef—we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “But why? I just want to know why.”

  “What’s the point, Vladimir? You won’t remember this tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I just want to know why.”

  “Because if I refused a job because the target was an Easterner, I’d be accepting that there are two classes of people, and I wouldn’t accept that.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously? That was your reasoning?”

  “Yes. And don’t tell me I was being an idiot, because I know that already.”

  “You were being an idiot.”

  She sighed. “Good night, Vladimir.”

  She went off to the bedroom; I had another drink.

  She was right, of course. I remembered nothing about the conversation. Until now.

  * * *

  I’d rented the back room of the Blue Flame for the evening and the night, and laid down fifty Imperials against drinks and breakage, though I didn’t expect any breakage; it wasn’t that kind of night. But I made sure there was plenty of wine, oishka, and Fenarian brandy, as well as Flamebrew. I, myself, was drinking the latter. That was their own beer, a golden-colored brew made, I was told, by using a lot more malt than was usual. It had a big, dense head, and tasted light and clean and kind of spicy-sweet, and was the only beer I’d ever found that I liked. They served it in big, square wooden cups filled until the head stood out of the top like a wave held still right at the point of collapse, which is something you can do in a painting but is a lot trickier in real life.

  I put myself in a corner and for a long time didn’t talk to anyone. I wasn’t required to: my job had been done when I rented the place and put up the money.

  About thirty people showed up, though there weren’t more than twenty at any one time. But still, a good turnout. Sticks would have been pleased. Everyone spoke in low tones, because we weren’t Dzur; and there were never any formal speeches or service, because we weren’t Dragons. We were Jhereg, and sometimes this happened, but there was no reason to pretend to be happy about it.

  Most people were in groups of three or four, telling stories about Sticks, or maybe just talking. Then Narvane came up to me and sat down.

  “Hey, Boss,” he said. “Hey, Kragar.”

  Okay, I guess I hadn’t been alone.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

  “I don’t wanna get sentimental,” he said.

  I bit back a reply and waited.

  “But Sticks, he said he liked working for you. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He nodded and wandered off.

  “He was a good guy,” said Kragar.

  I nodded. “Did you know him before he came to work for us?”

  “Oh, yeah. Back in the day. He was a lot crazier when he was younger.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Vlad, you’re still younger.”

  “Okay, so, I won’t be so crazy when I’m older.”

  “I was with him once, we were doing some collecting for Dofer. You ever meet Dofer?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good guy. Retired a while ago. Not ambitious, but reliable. He sent us to collect from this Dzur.”

  “They’re the worst. I sometimes wonder why I even let them go into debt.”

  “Yeah. So, this woman, I don’t remember her name, but she loved clubs and public houses, you know? She had a few favorites she could be found at. Every other night you’d find her sitting around one of them, drinking, laughing, maybe getting into a fight, maybe not. So, we weren’t keen on finding her there, especially in public, because she’d feel like she had to fight, and, well, she’s a Dzur right? Who wants that? So one afternoon, Sticks says, ‘Come on, let’s get this taken care of.’ And he leads me off to one of this woman’s favorite places, a little cellar on Garshos, and we go in. It’s pretty empty, and she isn’t there, so I figure we’ll leave, right? Wrong. He starts smashing up the place. Bottles, chairs, cups. Just demolishes it. The host is screaming about the Phoenix Guards, so I go over and put a knife at his throat and shake my head. He noticed the knife. Then Sticks says to him, ‘There’s this woman, a Dzur, and every time she comes in here, I’m gonna do this again. And if you call the Guards, I’m gonna do the same thing to your body. Got it? And that’s gonna keep happening until she comes up with what she owes. Tell her that. Whether you let her in, that’s up to you.’ Then we hit two more places she liked to drink and did the same thing. Then we went home. Dofer got paid that evening.”

  “Nice,” I said. “But taking a chance.”

  “Yeah, and I didn’t like it. But back then, you didn’t know what he’d do.”

  “He settled down though.”

  “Oh, yeah. A lot. Once, a long time later, we were working for Toronnan, and we needed to see this tailor, a Chreotha. We go into his shop, and I’m all set to slap him around and give him the talk ab
out, you know, being responsible with his debts or whatever, and—”

  “You give the talk?”

  “Well, I figured Sticks would do that, while I did the slapping.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “You want me to tell this story or not, Vlad?”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “So Sticks goes in, doesn’t say a word, just stands in front of the guy, puts his foot up on a chair, and starts tapping one of his sticks on the guy’s table. You know, the guy starts in with, ‘Who are you?’ and, ‘What do you want?’ and Sticks just keeps tapping on that table. The guy says to get out, and Sticks just keeps tapping. And the guy says he’ll call for help, and his voice is all shrill and he’s going, ‘Who are you? I don’t know you. What do you want?’ and, you know, Sticks just keeps tapping, and the guy says, ‘All right! I’ll have his money tomorrow by noon!’ And we turn around and leave, and I don’t know where he got the money, but he got it.”

  “That sounds more like the Sticks I knew.”

  Kragar nodded and lifted his cup. “Gonna miss him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  * * *

  I pulled my eyes from the fountain. “What the—”

  “A memory,” he said.

  “You saw that?”

  “No, but it’s how this works. As I told you. This is where the Purple Robes come to have their memories restored after they’ve served their time.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Any chance of cheerful memories, or am I in the wrong afterlife for that?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Depends on you.”

  “Heh,” I said.

  “Loiosh, did you see anything?”

  “Just echoes of what you saw, Boss.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can also see past lives here,” he added. “At least sometimes. I’ve done it.”

  “Just in general, or specific ones, like, you want to know about your second, or your third, or whatever?”

  “If you just look at it, you’ll get some random memory, but you can sometimes direct it, if you can, well, it’s hard to explain. You don’t ask a question—there’s no consciousness there to ask. But if you focus on something, you can sort of control it.”

  “Could you be a little more vague?”