Steven Brust - Orca

This is a funny part of the world, Kiera. Have you noticed it? The landscape, I mean. Maybe it’s because we’re so far north of the equator, or because the Kanefthali Mountains start only a few hundred miles away—-though I don’t see how that can have anything to do with it. But it seems odd to me that you can walk from the east side of Northport to the west, or from hills overlooking the docks straight north, and you’ll have four completely different landscapes. I mean, along the coast, it might as well be Adrilankha—you’ve got the same kind of ugly red cliffs and the sort of dirt that makes you think nothing could ever grow there no matter what you did. But just a little ways to the east you have these prairies that look like the area around Castle Black and west of Dzur Mountain, and there’s lots of water and it looks like it might be good farmland. And the country around Endra’s is all rocky and hard and pretty in the same way the southern tip of Suntra is pretty—unforgiving, but attractive, anyway. So you head north, along the river to where Reega lives, and it’s like the big forests to the east of Dzur Mountain, almost jungle, only they’ve been cut back because there are a lot of people there, but it isn’t hard to imagine running into a dzur or a tiassa prowling around. Isn’t that strange? I wonder if there’s some magic about it, or if it just happened that way.

But sorry, I’ve wandered away from the point. Reega’s place was nestled in among a lot of trees and stuff, and looked completely untended—there were a good number of other houses in the area, so I had to ask directions a few times to figure out which it was. It was nice, Kiera. I mean it was smaller than Fyres’s or Endra’s, though still quite a bit bigger than this place, but it seemed to want to be a house, instead of a mansion that wanted to be a castle.

Looking at it, I figured that when I clapped she’d answer the door herself, and, as a matter of fact, that’s just what happened.

She was a bit shorter and a bit heavier than her sister, and her hair was longer and curled quite a bit, but they had pretty much the same face. She looked at me the way someone who lived in a house like that ought to look at you, as if she was a bit curious about why someone would want to talk to her—by which I mean, not like the daughter of someone as rich as Fyres ought to look at you. I wondered if I was at the wrong place. I said, “Baroness Reega?”

“That’s right,” she said. “And you are—?”

“Kaldor. May I speak to you for a moment?”

“Concerning what?” she asked. She still seemed polite and friendly, but she hadn’t invited me in.

“Your father.”

“My father?”

“You are the daughter of Lord Fyres, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes I am.”

“Well, then, what I have to say concerns you.”

She gave me a contemplative look and said, “What is it, then?”

It seemed odd to be discussing this standing outside of her house, but it was her choice. I said, “I have reason to believe that the Empire is not looking into his death as thoroughly as they ought to be.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits, and she studied me, and I was suddenly not at all sure of my disguise. She said, “Oh you do, do you?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And what business is that of yours?”

Ah ha. If you’ve been counting, Kiera, that was the third “ah ha” of the day.

“My lady?”

“Why do you care?”

“Well, I was hoping, you know, that ... uh ...”

“That there would be a reward in it for you?”

“Well—”

She gestured with her hand toward the road behind me. “You may leave now.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I bowed and left. It had been a long walk for a short conversation, but no walk is wasted if there’s an “Ah ha” at the end of it. I shared this thought with Loiosh, who suggested that he could supply me with as many “ah ha’s” as I wanted. I didn’t have an answer handy, so I just headed back to town.

My next stop was the Riversend, because I figured that would give my story some verisimilitude with my shadows, and because it had a back door in case I wanted to use it, and because I had my clothes and my weapons stashed there. If I needed to visit the son and the widow, I figured it would wait, because evening was coming on and my feet were hurting like blazes, and I wanted a good meal and a drink, which was another reason to stop at the Riversend.

But first things first. I asked Loiosh what my shadows were up to. He said, “One’s going around to the back, boss.”

“Is the other one coming in?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I walked through the tavern, opened up the back door, moved a few empty crates, recovered the bundle that I’d made of my possessions, recovered my sword from behind the garbage pile, and slipped back inside before Timmer or Domm or whoever it was got there. The inn wasn’t very crowded, but no one particularly noticed me, anyway.

I sat down at a table and caused the host (whose name really is Trim, by the way) to bring me some wine, a bowl of fish soup, and whatever fowl they had roasting away over the spit and producing those amazing smells. They were apparently basting it with some sort of honey and lemon mixture that made the fire dance very prettily and made my stomach growl like a dzur.

Trim’s service was very fast, and his food was very good; I hoped that they wouldn’t question the poor bastard, or if they did, that they were nice about it.

I ate, drank, rested, and tried to figure out my next step. The last was the hard part, the others come pretty easy if you practice long enough. Loiosh was getting hungry, too, which I felt bad about, but I needed him to keep watching, so my meal was accompanied by his running complaints. I didn’t allow this to detract from the food, however.

Then Loiosh said, “Boss, the guy’s coming inside.”

“Okay,” I said, and I placed the sword against the wall behind me, resting it against a support beam where it would be, if not hidden, at least not horribly obvious. I made sure I had a dagger near to hand, then I finished sopping up the meal with the remains of the bread—a good black bread made with seeds of some kind.

In fact, they both came in—the man and the woman—and planted themselves in front of me; no doubt they’d received instructions from headquarters. I looked up at them with an expression of profound innocence, to which I tried to mix in a certain amount of alarm.

“Lord Kaldor?” said the man.

I nodded.

“May we speak with you for a moment?”

I nodded again.

“I’m Lieutenant Domm, this is Ensign Timmer, of Her Imperial Majesty’s Guard.”

I nodded for the third time. I was getting good at it.

They sat down, even though I hadn’t invited them to; I think they felt that standing while I sat would make it harder for them to intimidate me. Meanwhile, I tried to act like I was intimidated but trying to act like I wasn’t. I don’t think I did very well—it’s a lot easier to pretend to be tough when you’re scared than to pretend to be scared when you’re tough. Or, at least, it is for me.

“Needany help, boss?”

“Not yet, Loiosh.”

“We’d just like to ask you some questions. We understand that you’ve been telling people that we’re not conducting a thorough investigation into a certain matter. We’d like to know why you think so.”

I was betting on Reega over Endra, so I said, “My lord, I went over to the city hall today, where they’re—you’re—talking to everyone, and I told them what I knew, and they didn’t care, so I figured that must mean—”

“Bullshit,” said Timmer, opening her mouth for the first time. “What’s the real reason?”