Orca

by Steven Brust

  I got up and walked out of the room, my back itching as I passed him, but he made no move. On the way out of the inn, I flipped the host a couple of imperials and apologized about the door. I walked around some corners to make sure I wasn’t being followed, then I teleported back to the blue cottage and went in.

  Vlad was waiting for me. He said, “Well?”

  One disadvantage of teleports is that they sometimes get you there too quickly—I hadn’t had time to sort out my thoughts yet. I said, “Is there anything to eat?”

  “No. I could cook something.”

  I nodded. “That would be good. I’m a bit tired.”

  “Oh?” said Vlad.

  “I’ll get to it.”

  He shrugged. Savn was near the hearth, sitting up and looking at nothing. Hwdfrjaanci sat hear him, with Buddy at her feet. Buddy watched me as he always did, but wasn’t unfriendly. Loiosh sat on Vlad’s shoulder. I felt like I’d been through a pitched battle, and it was somehow amazing that no one in the house shared my exhaustion.

  Vlad said, “Do you want to hear my news first, or after yours?”

  I said, “Let’s look at your arm.”

  Vlad shrugged, started to speak, and then apparently realized that I wasn’t ready to think about anything quite yet. He wordlessly took off his shirt. I undid the bandage and inspected the wound, which seemed about the same as it had four hours earlier.

  Only four hours!

  I washed it and walked over to the linen chest to find something clean to wrap it in.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” said Vlad.

  “You’ve been stabbed,” said Savn.

  Chapter Eight

  Even Buddy—tail thumping and floppy ears vainly trying to prick forward—was staring at him. He, in turn, was staring at Vlad’s arm—an intense stare, a creepy stare; he was standing up, his whole body rigid. Savn’s voice had the uneven rasp of long disuse, or of young adulthood, take your pick. He said, “You were stabbed with a knife.”

  “That’s right, Savn,” said Vlad, and I could hear him working to keep his voice even. He didn’t move a muscle. Hwdf rjaanci wasn’t moving, either; for that matter, neither was I.

  “Was it really cold when it went in? Did it hurt? How deep did it go?”

  Vlad made some odd sort of sound from his throat. Savn’s questions came slowly, as if there was a great deal of consideration behind them; but the tone was of casual curiosity, which in turn was at odds with his posture—it was very unsettling for me, and I could see that it was even more so for Vlad.

  “Not all knives have points, you know,” said Savn. “Some of them you can’t stab with, only cut.” As he said that word, he made a quick cutting gesture with his right hand; and that was creepy, too, because while he did it the rest of his body didn’t move, and his face didn’t change expression; it was only the arm movement and the emphasis in his voice.

  “Only cut,” he said again.

  Then he didn’t say anything else. We waited, not moving, for several minutes, but he’d said what he had to say. Vlad said, “Savn?” and got no response. Savn sat down again, but that also showed something—he hadn’t been told to. Vlad came over and knelt down facing him. “Savn? Are you ... are you all right?”

  The boy just sat the way he’d been sitting all along. Vlad turned and said, “What happened, Mother?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it’s a good sign. I know it’s a good sign. I don’t know how good, but we’re getting somewhere.”

  “You think that came from healing the injury?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it was time. Or the right stimulus. Or some combination. Have you been cut in the last year?”

  “Not even threatened,” said Vlad.

  “Then that may be it.”

  “What do we do now? Should I cut myself some more?” I wasn’t certain he was joking.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Talk about knives, maybe.”

  I was watching Savn the whole time, and at the word “knives” there was a perceptible twitch around the left side of his mouth. Vlad saw it, too. He said, “Savn, do you want to talk about knives?”

  The boy’s expression didn’t change, but he said, “You have to take care of the good ones. A good knife is expensive. The good ones stay sharp longer, too. Sometimes you have to cut people to heal them, and you should use a really good one, and a really sharp one for that. You can hurt someone more with a dull knife than with a sharp knife.”

  “Are you afraid of knives?” said Vlad.

  Savn didn’t seem to hear him. He said, “You should always clean it when you’re done—wash it and dry it. You have to dry it, especially. It won’t rust—the good ones are made so they don’t rust. But if you leave something on it, it can corrode, and that ruins it, and good knives are expensive. Good knives stay sharp. They get sharper and sharper the more they’re used, until they get so sharp they can cut you right in half just by looking at you.”

  “Knives don’t get sharper on their own,” said Vlad.

  “And they can stab you, too. If the point is sharp, it can stab all the way through you, and all the way through everybody, and stab the sky until it falls, and stab all the way through everything.”

  Then he fell silent once more. After a couple of minutes, Vlad turned around and said, “He isn’t responding to what I say, Mother.”

  “No,” she said. “But you got him started. That means, on some level, he is responding to you.”

  Vlad turned back and looked at him some more. I tried to read the expression on Vlad’s face, then decided I didn’t want to.

  He got up and came over to where Hwdf rjaanci and I stood watching. He whispered to her, “Should I try again, or let him rest?”

  She frowned. “Let him rest, I think. If he starts up again on his own, we’ll take it from there.”

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I’m encouraged, but I don’t know.”

  “All right,” said Vlad. “I’m going to make some klava.”

  By the time it was done, Savn had gone to sleep—perhaps talking for the first time after a year’s silence had tired him out. We drank our klava standing on the far side of the room, near the stove and the oven. Hwdf rjaanci eventually went over and sat down next to the boy, watching him while he slept. Vlad took a deep breath and said, “All right, let’s hear it.”

  “Huh? Hear what?”

  He laughed. “What you came in with an hour ago, and were so excited about that you had to take some time before you could talk about it. Remember?”

  “Oh.” I felt myself smiling. “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah. Let’s hear it.”

  I nodded and gave him the short version, which took about ten minutes. He said, “Let’s have it all.”

  “Do you really need it?”

  “I won’t know until I hear it.”

  I was going to argue, but then I realized that if he’d given me the short version of his sortie, I wouldn’t have made the connection to Lord Khaavren, and my talk with Loftis would have gone rather differently. So I filled in most of the details, helped now and then by Vlad’s questions. He seemed especially interested in exactly when everything had happened and in precisely how I’d fooled Loftis—that, in particular, he wanted me to go over several times, until I felt like I was being questioned under the Orb. I pleaded poor memory for the parts of it I didn’t want to talk about and eventually he relented, but when I was done, he looked at me oddly.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Eh? Oh, nothing, Kiera. I’m just impressed—I didn’t know you had that in you.”

  “The deception or remembering the details?”

  “Both, actually.”

  I shrugged. “And how was your day?”

  “Much shorter, much simpler, much easier to report, and probably more mystifying.”

  “Oh?”

  “In a word: they’re closed.”

&nb
sp; “Huh?”

  “Gone. Finished. Doors locked, signs gone.”

  “Who is?”

  “All of them: Northport Securities, Brugan Exchange, Westman—all of them.”

  “The whole building?”

  “About three-quarters of the building, near as I can tell—but all of the companies that were part of Fyres’s little empire are gone.”

  “Verra! What did you do?”

  “I went to City Hall—remember, you saw me there?”

  “Yes, but for what?”

  “Well, the building was still open; I thought I’d find out who owned it.”

  “Good thinking. And who owns the building?”

  “A company called Dion and Sons Management.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “And they’re located right in the same building, and they’re out of business, too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So much for bright ideas.”

  “Well, what now, Vlad?”

  “I don’t know. How can they sell the land if the company that claims ownership doesn’t exist? If they can’t, we could just forget the whole thing right now; all we’re really trying to accomplish is to keep the old woman on her land. But I’m afraid that, if we do that, someone will show up—”

  “Is that it?”

  “What do you mean and why are you smiling?”

  “I just have a feeling that you’re hooked on this thing now—you have to find out what’s going on for its own sake.”

  He smiled. “You think so? Well, you may be right, I am curious, but you show me some proof that our hostess here is going to be able to keep her lovely blue cottage and I’ll be gone so fast you’ll only feel the breeze.”

  “Heh.”

  He shrugged. “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. Aren’t you curious?”

  “Oh, heavens yes. That’s a big part of why I signed onto this. But I’m willing to admit it, and you—”

  “Yeah, well, ask me again tomorrow and I might give you a different answer. Meanwhile—”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, what next?”

  “Well, any interest in starting at the top and trying to find out who in the Empire is behind all this?”

  “No.”

  “Me, neither.” He thought for a minute. “Well, I’m not sure if I’ve gotten anywhere with the daughters, so we can’t count on that for anything, but we’ve got one foot in the door with our dear friend from the Tasks Group—thanks to you. And we’ve got another foot in the door with the Jhereg—thanks to you. So how about if we try for a third foot—anatomically interesting, if nothing else—and triangulate?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Finding this bank that closed down.”

  I thought it over. “Not bad. Just keep worrying away at different sides of the problem and see what gives?”

  He spread his hands. “That’s all I can think of.”

  “It makes sense. Do you want me to do it?”

  He nodded. “I think you’ll be more effective dealing with bankers than I will. I’m going to hang tight right here, and see if I can do Savn any good.”

  He said it conversationally, but I could tell there was a lot of tension behind the words. I spoke lightly, saying, “Yes, that makes sense. I’ll see what I can find.”

  “After lunch,” he suggested.

  Lunch, on this occasion, involved a loaf of bread which was hollowed out and filled with some kind of reddish sauce that had large chunks of this and that in it, featuring pieces of chicken with the skin but without the bones. Savn sat at the table with us, eating mechanically and appearing, once more, oblivious to everything around him. This dampened the conversation a bit. It seemed odd that Savn happily used the knife in front of him to eat with and didn’t seem at all put out or unduly fascinated by it, but the ways of the mind are strange, I guess.

  I suggested to Vlad that if the Jhereg really wanted to find him, all they had to do was keep track of garlic consumption throughout the Empire. He suggested that I not spread the idea around, because he’d as soon let them find him as quit eating garlic.

  Then we got onto business. I said, “Mother, you said the bank closed?”

  She nodded.

  “Which bank?”

  She glanced at me, then at Vlad, opened her mouth, closed it, shrugged, and said, “Northport Private Services Bank. Are you going to rob it?”

  “If it’s closed,” I said, “I doubt there’s any money in it—or anything else for that matter.”

  “Probably,” said Vlad. Then he frowned. “Unless ...”

  “Unless what?”

  “I’m remembering something.”

  I waited.

  He said, “That gossip sheet, Rutter’s Rag, said something about the banks.”

  “Yes?”

  “It made a point of how quickly everyone got out of there.” He turned to Hwdf rjaanci. “Do you know anything about that, Mother?”

  She said, “I know it closed down fast. My friend Hen-brook—it was her bank, too, and I don’t know what she’s going to do—anyway, she was in town that day, and she said they were open just like usual at thirteen o’clock, and at fourteen there were these wagons there—the big wagons, with armed guards and everything—and by noon it was shut up tight.”

  Vlad nodded. “Two hours. They took two hours to clear the place out.”

  Hwdf’rjaanci agreed. “They had a hundred men, and wagons lined up all down the street. And the other banks, too, went the same way, at the same time, near as I can tell.”

  “In which case,” said Vlad, “they can’t have done a very good job of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean clearing things out. They were in a hurry to be gone before their customers got to them, and—”

  “Then why not seal things inside?”

  He shrugged. “Too much sorcery floating around. Get people mad enough, and at least one of them will be able to tear down the building.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll buy that. But do you really think it likely that there’s anything still in there?”

  “Oh, I doubt there’s any money in it, but you never know what might be left behind.”

  “You mean, papers and things?”

  He nodded.

  “If they went under, wouldn’t they be careful to clean up anything worth looking at?”

  “How much time would it take to clean up every last scrap of paper, Kiera? Could they do it in two hours?”

  “Probably not. But all the important ones—”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. I don’t know how banks operate, but they’re bound to generate immense amounts of paperwork, and—”

  “And you’re willing to wade through immense amounts of paper, just to see if there might be something useful?”

  “Right now, any edge we can get amounts to a lot. Yeah, I don’t mind taking an evening to go through their wastebas-kets—or, rather, papers that missed the wastebaskets—and see if there’s something that points us anywhere interesting.”

  I thought it over for a minute. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll look around and get what I can; it should be easy enough.” I turned to Hwdf rjaanci. “Where is it?”

  “In town,” she said. “Stonework Road, near the Potter’s Field Road.” She gave me more precise directions.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll look around it today. Since you’re so used to going to City Hall, can you—”

  “Find out who owns it? Sure.”

  “But just get the name and address.”

  “Right. I should have cooked some vegetables to go with this.”

  “I wouldn’t have had room for them,” I said.

  “That’s true. You don’t eat much, do you?”

  “I’m trying to keep my slender girlish figure.”

  “Ah. That’s what it is.”

  We finished, and, since I was doing the dangerous work, I allowed him to volunteer to
clean up. Not that there was that much to clean up after Loiosh, Rocza, and Buddy got through with the plates.

  “All right,” I said, “ ‘Once more upon the path, and may the wind cry our tale.’”

  “Villsni?”

  “Kliburr.” I headed out the door.

  Vlad said, “I don’t know how you do it, Kiera.”

  “Eh? You’re the one with all the quotations. I was just imitating you.”

  “No, not that—teleporting right after a meal. I just don’t know how you manage.”

  I managed fine, bringing myself, first, home to Adri-lankha to acquire some tools, and then to the same teleport spot I’d used before, it being one of very few I knew in Northport. Then I set out to find the bank, which was easy from the directions I’d been given. I was looking forward to this. I’d never broken into a bank before, and certainly never in the middle of the day; the fact that the bank was now out of business only took a little of the fun away.

  And it was, indeed, out of business—there was a large sign on it that spelled out “Permanently Closed,” along with the water and hand symbol for those who couldn’t read, and there were large boards over all the windows, and bars across the doors. I walked around it once. It was an attractive building, two stories high with a set of six pillars in front, and all done in very fine stonework. It took up about a hundred and forty meters across the front and went back about a hundred and ninety meters, and there were no alleys behind it—just a big cleared area that had become an impromptu produce market since it closed. The cleared area was, no doubt, to make sure that the guards had a good view.

  On the other hand, now that it was closed, there seemed to be no security worth mentioning—certainly no one on duty there, and only the most basic and easily defeated alarm spells, proving that there was no money left in it. Anyone could have broken into the bank at this stage, and anyone would have done so just the way I was going to—which showed that no one thought there was anything at all of interest there. I shrugged. I’d know soon enough.

  One of the devices I’d gotten from home was in the form of a tube that fit snugly into my hand. I palmed it and leaned against the building. I placed the tube against the wall, and in a few seconds I was seeing the inside of the building, and in a few more seconds I was seeing it clearly enough to teleport; no one was looking at me, so I did.