Orca

by Steven Brust

  There was a minor spell inside to detect sorcery, so I disabled it before doing a light spell, then I started looking around.

  There really isn’t any point in going into the details. It was big, and it was empty, and there was a lot of small offices, two vaults, and a basement, and I looked at them all, and it took me about four and a half hours, and at the end of it I had a bag full of scraps of paper. The good news, or the bad news, was that I’d found right away a very large bin full of papers that they’d never gotten around to throwing into the stove—good news because it meant there was a lot of material, bad news because if any of it was important it would have been taken or destroyed. But I wasn’t the one who had to go through them all.

  I kept them sorted just a bit, in case Vlad would want to know which ones were found where. I knew that most of them, probably all of them, would be worthless, but Vlad would be stuck with going over them, so I had no problem doing the collecting. When I was done, I teleported directly back to the cottage. Buddy, who was outside, started barking when I appeared, but settled down quickly.

  “Hey,” I told him. “Don’t worry. I got the goods.”

  He wagged his tail.

  Vlad came to the door, probably in response to Buddy, and held it open for me. He said, “Well?”

  I held up the sack full of papers. “Enjoy.”

  “No problems?”

  “None. How about the boy?”

  “He started talking about knives again—this time without any prompting at all. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. Maybe it’s both. And he’s sleeping an awful lot.”

  I sat down. The boy was asleep. Hwdf rjaanci was sitting by him, quietly singing what sounded like a lullaby. Vlad accepted the papers. He seemed a bit startled by how heavy the bag was; he weighed it in his hands and whistled appreciatively.

  “What did you find out?” I asked him.

  “The banker was—or is—Lady Vonnith, House of the Orca, naturally. She owned the bank completely, according to the paperwork at City Hall, which may or may not be reliable. She’s also the ‘pointer’—whatever that means—for three other banks, one of which has gone under and the other two of which are still solvent, but both of which have issued a ‘Hold of Purchase’; again, whatever that is. She lives not too far from Endra.” He gave me the address.

  “Okay.”

  “What’s a pointer?”

  “I don’t know where the term came from,” I said. “But it means she’s in charge of the business, she runs it, even if she doesn’t own it. At a guess, she gets a whomping big cut of the profits, or she’s a part owner, or, most likely, she’s the full owner under a different name.”

  “Why do that?”

  I smiled. “Because if one of her banks files surrender of debts, which just happened, she can keep running the others without the debts of one being assessed against the income of the others, which the Empire is supposed to do.”

  “Oh. Is that legal?”

  “If she isn’t caught.”

  “I see. What is a Hold of Purchase?”

  “It means the bank has the right to keep your money.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was a law passed in the twelfth Teckla Reign. It prevents everyone from pulling his money out all at once and driving the bank under. There are all sorts of laws about when it can be invoked, and for how long, and what percentage of their cash they have to release, and to whom, and I don’t really understand it myself. But it may mean they’re in trouble, or, more likely, it means that with banks going under they’re afraid of a general panic and they’re taking steps to prevent one.”

  “They,” he repeated. “The owners of the bank, or the Empire?”

  “The owners request it, the Empire grants it—or doesn’t.”

  “I see. That’s interesting. Who in the Empire would they go to to get such an order?”

  “The Minister of the Treasury’s office.”

  “Who’s the Minister of the Treasury?”

  “His name is Shortisle.”

  “Shortisle,” said Vlad. “Hmmm.”

  “What?”

  “That name came up in Fyres’s notes, somewhere. Something about it struck me as odd, but I didn’t pay much attention, and now I can’t remember what it was. I guess they met for dinner or something.”

  “Hardly surprising,” I said. “The Minister of the Treasury and a major entrepreneur? Sure.”

  “Yes, but ... never mind. I’ll think about it. House?”

  “Shortisle? Orca.”

  He nodded, and fell into a reverie of contemplation.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Go home. I’ll go over your booty tonight, which should leave me with, oh, at least half an hour to sleep. Tomorrow you make contact with the banker and see what you can learn.”

  “All right,” I said. “Should I check with you first, to see what you’ve found out?”

  “Yeah. But don’t hurry—I want a chance to at least close my eyes and snore once before you show up.”

  “Okay. Sleep well.”

  He looked at the bag full of dusty scrap paper in his hand and favored me with a thin smile. Loiosh stretched his wings and hissed, as if he were laughing at us both.

  When I returned in the morning, the table near the stove was filled with the papers I’d discovered, all neatly sorted into four stacks, and, if I remembered the quantity correctly, reduced by about three-quarters. Vlad had the bleary-eyed look of someone who had just woken up, and Savn was still asleep by the hearth, Loiosh, Rocza, and Buddy curled up with him. Buddy thumped his tail once, gave a dog yawn, gave a whiny sigh, and put his head down on his paws. There were pieces of charcoal on the floor, more testimony to Vlad’s state; the water was boiling, and I could see the klava tin next to it, and Vlad was staring at them like he’d forgotten what they were for.

  I said, “What did you learn?”

  He said, “Huh?”

  “Make the klava.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “The water goes into the inverted cone sitting on the—”

  “I know how to make Verra-be-damned klava.”

  “Right.”

  He completed the operation, not spilling any water, which impressed me, then he scowled at the floor and went looking for a broom. I said, “I take it it will be a while before I get my answers.”

  “Huh? Yeah. Just let me drink a cup of this poison.”

  “Poison? I thought you liked klava.”

  “She’s out of honey,” he said, practically snarling.

  “Back in a minute,” I said.

  By the time the klava was done, I was back with a crock of honey, and Vlad said, “You must be sure to permit me to be cut into pieces for you sometime.”

  “Been reading Paarfi again?”

  “I don’t know how to read. In an hour, maybe I’ll know how to read.”

  He put honey into the mugs, pressed the klava, and poured a little bit more than two mugs’ worth into two mugs. He cursed. I said, “I’ll clean it up.”

  “I’ll also be immolated for you whenever you wish.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  Half an hour later he was himself again, more or less. I said, “Okay, what did you learn?”

  “I learned,” he said slowly, “that either it takes a trained expert to learn things from pieces of scrap paper, or it takes an amateur a long, long time to look for a greenstalk in the grass.”

  “In other words, you learned nothing?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say nothing.”

  He was smiling. He’d gotten something. I nodded and waited. He said, “Most of it was numbers. There were a lot of numbers. I didn’t pay much attention to them, until I realized they probably meant money; then they caused me a certain distress. But that still wasn’t helpful. I haven’t thrown them away, because you never know, but I did set them aside.”

  I kept waiting.

  “A few of those scraps of paper had names, sometime
s with cryptic notes. Those I paid more attention to. I sorted them into three groups. One pile has mostly numbers but maybe a name, or a word that might be a code word, or something like that. Another has messages—things like, ‘Lunch, Firstday, Swallowtail, Lady Preft,’ or ‘Modify collateral policy on mortgage holdings—meeting three o’clock.’ The third pile—”

  He stood up, walked over to the table, and picked up a few pieces of paper. “The third pile contains the results of going through the other two—these are scraps I came up with after looking at and rejecting a lot more. There isn’t much, but there may be something.”

  He brought them over and handed them to me. “Okay, Kiera,” he said. “Let’s see if you’re as devious as I am. Take them one at a time, in order, and try to put it together.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I like games.”

  There were four slips of paper—two of them obviously torn off from larger sheets, the other two on very plain paper. The one on top, one of the torn fragments, was written in a very elegant, precise hand, an easy one to read. It read, SDforBT, 5&10, 8:00, Skyday, Cklshl.

  I said, “Well, 5D, if we were talking about money, is probably five dots: five thousand imperials. But that’s a Jhereg term—I wouldn’t have expected a banker to use it.”

  “Yep. That’s exactly what caught my eye. Keep going.”

  I shrugged. “Skyday is easy, and so is 8:00. But I don’t know what BT means, 5&10, or what cee kay ell ess aech ell spells.”

  He said, “Start with the last. There’s a small inn, not far from the bank, that’s marked by a sign of a seashell, and it’s called the Cockleshell. Our hostess told me about it.

  She says it isn’t the sort of place one might normally find a banker.”

  “Hmmm. This is getting interesting. A payoff of some sort?”

  Vlad nodded. “Look at the time again.”

  I did so. “Right,” I said. “Whether it’s eight in the morning or eight at night, it isn’t at a time when banks are open.”

  “Exactly. Now, what do you make of the 5&10?”

  “Five—and ten-imperial notes, or pieces?”

  He nodded. “That’s my guess. Coins, probably. Clumsy to carry, but safer to negotiate.”

  “Then it is a payoff. And BT is the person being paid off—out of bank funds. Any idea who that is?”

  “Try the next note.”

  It was just like the first—same hand, same amount, different day and time, only no place was mentioned, and the “5&10” was missing. It had been crumbled up, like someone had thrown it at a wastepaper basket and missed. I said, “Well? They did it at the bank?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe we’ve found an early one and a late one, and there was no need to name the place or the denominations because by now she knew it. And another thing: look at the blotting on both of them.”

  “It’s sloppy.”

  “Right. They were just notes by—I presume—Lady Vonnith to herself. If they were ever turned into official copies, those were filed, processed, and taken—or, more likely, destroyed. But she scribbled these while doing calculations or talking to someone, and then apparently tossed them at the wastepaper basket and missed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And this one is fairly recent—like, perhaps, the day they closed down.”

  “Right.”

  I nodded. “I recognize the hand, by the way.”

  “You recognize it?”

  “Only in the sense that I remember where these came from, and there was a lot of paper there, most of it, like this, crumbled up into balls and lying on the floor, and a bunch of them that, just guessing, had fallen behind a desk or a filing cabinet and weren’t worth retrieving. And it was, indeed, the biggest office in the place, so I’d guess you’re right about whose notes these are.”

  He nodded. “Okay. After I’d gotten that far, I went through all the notes again, looking for any reference at all to BT.”

  “I take it you found something?”

  “Yep. Read the next one.”

  “Different hand,” I said. “Probably a man. Was it found in the same place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it was written to her, not by her. Hmmm. Not as legible, but I think I can make it out. ‘There are questions about dispersals to BT—I think we should tighten it up before it mirrors. Should we use the disc, fund?’ And I can’t read the signature at all—I imagine it’s the scrawl someone uses informally.”

  “Yes, I suspect you’re right. So what do you make of that one?”

  “That’s a curious little phrase, ‘before it mirrors.’ “

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Why not say, ‘before it reflects?’ And what would that mean, anyway? Do you have a guess?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. Let’s hear yours, though.”

  “ ‘Before it mirrors.’ Hmmm.”

  “Give up?”

  “Not yet; you’re enjoying this too much.” I pondered for a while and came up with nothing. “All right, I give up. What did you see that I didn’t?”

  Vlad smiled with one side of his face. “The next note.”

  “Heh. Okay.” I looked at the fourth and last of the notes Vlad had found. This was the longest, and, as far as I could tell, the most innocuous. It said, Lady—Lord Sustorr was in again—he now wants to secure his loan with his share of Northport Coal. I told him he had to talk to you, but it seems reasonable. I’m going to start running numbers on it. Some big shot from the Ministry of the Treasury was in today looking for you. He didn’t leave his name, but says he’ll be back tomorrow—it may be an Imperial Audit, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about. I spoke with Nurtria about the complaint we received, and he promises to be more polite in the future. Lady Aise was in about the Club meeting. She left the flyer that’s attached to this note. Firrna is still sick; we may have to replace him if this goes on—remind me to talk to you about it. It was signed with the same illegible scrawl as the last one. I read it three times, then looked up at Vlad.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you see it?”

  “It’s pretty thin,” I said. “It fits, but it’s pretty thin.”

  “It can’t be that thin,” said Vlad, “or you wouldn’t have picked up on it.”

  I shrugged. “We think alike. That doesn’t mean we’re right.”

  “It explains the mirror line. What you see in a mirror is yourself, and if he was looking for what he must have been looking for—” Vlad punctuated the sentence with a shrug.

  “No, I admit that. But still ...”

  “Yeah. It’s something to go on when I talk to Her Ladyship the banker.”

  I stared at the letter again.

  My, my, my.

  Chapter Nine

  Vlad had said something about missing the people who once did his legwork for him, but I have my own ways of finding out what I need to know. Breaking into Fyres’s house, when I had the house plans and all of the information ahead of time, was nice, and it had left me free to only look for certain things. This time, when I wasn’t even going to break in, I had more leisure—I’d even had the leisure to return home and study up on the House of the Orca, so I wouldn’t make any mistakes that I could avoid, although there could easily be pitfalls I wouldn’t know about. But if you’re trying to pull off a scam, the more information you have the better, so I went about collecting the information—my way.

  I stood in a small wooded area, about two hundred meters from Lady Vonnith’s front door, and studied her. That is, I studied her grounds and her house, which told me a great deal more about her than a similar study had told Vlad about Endra or Reega. But then, I have the advantage of age, and of spending a great deal of time learning about people only by seeing their houses (and especially trying to judge the inside by what I see of the outside), so maybe it isn’t a fair comparison.

  Vonnith’s home was much older than Fyres’s place, and, without doubt, had been built for an Orca. The gentle curves of roof and front were the trade
mark of the way they had liked their homes in the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Cycles—perhaps because it reminded them of their ships, but more likely because it reminded them of the sea. The late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Cycles, incidentally, were also one of the periods when the richest of them made a point of living as far inland as duty and fortune would permit, which was a further indication, as we were several leagues from the shore and there wasn’t even a river in sight.

  There was a high, ivy-covered stone wall running along one side of the grounds. It was recent enough that it had to be Vonnith who had it put in. It certainly wasn’t for security, or it would have gone around all the grounds, and it wasn’t attractive enough to have been put in for aesthetic reasons, so it was probably done to hide whatever was on the other side of it, which a quick glance told me was more of the same gentle, grass-covered hill Vonnith’s house was built on. Conclusion: she wanted to mark her boundaries. Second conclusion: she spent a great deal of time in that room on the second floor whose window looked out that way, with additional evidence provided by a not-unattractive stone monument midway between house and wall.

  The monument was of a person, probably an ancestor, most likely the person who had had the house built, yet it seemed new enough that Vonnith had had it put up herself. This was starting to look like she had increased the family fortunes, in which case there should be signs of additions and improvements on the house. And, looking for them, there they were—a bit on the far side that, however well it blended in, had to have been added, and, yes, all the dormers, and even some stonework running up alongside the doors.

  She seemed to have quite a fixation on stonework—maybe it had something to do with being an Orca and knowing that stone sinks, or maybe it had to do with being rich and wanting to do something that lasted. At a guess, the latter seemed most likely.

  Well, her bank hadn’t lasted.

  I wondered how she’d taken that. Was she one of those who would shrug it off and make excuses for it, even to herself? Would it destroy her? Would she mourn for a while, or would it inspire her to try again? Fyres was the last sort, I knew—every time his schemes had fallen apart, he’d started over again. I had to admire that.