Steven Brust - Orca

“You’re looking puzzled again, Cawti.”

“Yes. Your conversation with Loftis.”

“What about it?”

“How did you convince him that you were involved with the Empire?”

“Just what I said. I fed him a few details about things his group had been involved in.”

“But what details? What activities of theirs did you know about?”

“You and Vlad.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, he wanted to know that, too. He positively interrogated me about it.”

“And you said?”

“That I didn’t care to discuss it.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“I understand. How is Loiosh?”

“You want me to get ahead of the story?”

“Yes.”

“Loiosh is fine, as far as I know.”

“Okay.”

“Should I go on?”

“Please do.”

“All right.”

I sat for a long time after Vlad had finished speaking, digesting his words slowly and carefully, the way one might digest a seventeen-course Lyorn High Feast on Kieron’s Eve—a day I’ve never celebrated for personal reasons, though I’ve had the feast. I kept looking back and forth between Loiosh and Savn, who had perhaps gone a long way toward healing each other, although Loiosh showed no signs of injury save that he wasn’t moving much, and Savn showed no signs of healing save that he’d moved a little bit.

“Well?” said Vlad when he’d judged I’d been silent long enough.

“Well what?”

“Have you put it together?”

“Oh. Sorry, I was thinking about”—I gestured toward Savn—”other things.”

He nodded. “Do you want to try, or should I explain it?”

“Some of it, at least, is pretty obvious.”

“You mean, the land deal?”

“Yes. It was just a subtheme to the concerto: a few of them need to come up with a lot of cash in a hurry, so they buy out Fyres’s companies cheap, since they’re going under, anyway, then threaten people like our good Hwdfrjaanci with eviction to make them worried, then vanish so they don’t know what’s happening so they’ll panic, and then, in a day or two, our heroes will come back with offers to sell them the land at outrageous prices, in cash.”

He nodded. “With nice offers of loans at Jhereg-style interest rates to go with them.”

“So our hostess isn’t really in danger of losing her cottage, and, if she’s careful, she can probably avoid being overcharged too much. In fact, if we can come up with some cash for her, she can even avoid the interest rates.”

“I think we can do that,” said Vlad.

“Between us,” I said, “I have no doubt that we can.”

“What about the rest of it?” he said. “Can you put it together?”

“Maybe. Do you know it all?”

“Almost,” he said. “There’s still a piece or two missing, but I have some theories; and there’s also a lot of background stuff that you can probably explain.”

“What’s missing?”

“Loftis.”

“You mean, why did Reega have him killed?”

“Yes. If it was Reega.”

“You think Vonnith was lying?”

“Not lying. But we don’t know yet if it was Reega’s choice, or if she just arranged it.”

“Why would she arrange it?”

“Because she was in a position to. She had a lot to gain, and she was in touch with Loftis.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“Because of the way she reacted when I told her the Empire was covering up something.”

“Oh, right. I’d forgotten. Yeah, she might have just arranged it. But, if so, who did she arrange it for? And why?”

“Good questions. That’s what I’m still missing.” He shook his head. “I wish I knew what ‘he didn’t break the stick’ means.”

“I think I know,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It goes back to the Fifth and Sixth Cycles, and even into the Seventh, before flashstones.”

“Yes?”

“Some elite corps were given sorcery. Nothing fancy, just a couple of location spells, and usually one or two offensive weapons to be used over a distance. They weren’t all that effective, by the way.”

“Go on.”

“Whoever was the brigade’s sorcerer would bind the spells into a stick so that any idiot could release the spell. They used wood because binding them into stone took longer and was more difficult, although also more reliable.” I shrugged. “You point the stick at someone, and you release the spell, which doesn’t take a lot of skill, and you get a nasty scrape on your palm, and whoever you pointed the stick at has a much nastier burn. You can kill with it, and at a pretty good distance, if your hand is steady and your eye is good and, mostly, if the spell was put on right in the first place. Which it usually wasn’t,” I added, “according to the histories.”

“But what does—”

“Right. The thing is, the sticks were smoothed a bit to take the spell, but otherwise they were just sticks. Once you got into battle, you might be looking around and see one on the ground, but you’d have no way of knowing if it was discharged or not—that is, unless you were fairly skilled, the only way to find out if it had been used already was to discharge it. You can imagine that it might be embarrassing to pick one up on the field and assume it had a charge when it didn’t, or even the reverse.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“So the custom was to break it in half as soon as you’d discharged it.”

“And you think that’s what he was talking about?”

“ ‘Breaking the stick’ became a handy way of referring to leaving a signal, especially a warning.”

“How long since it’s been used?”

“A long time.”

“Then—”

“He was a military historian, Vlad. Remember how he kept making references to obscure—”

“Got it.”

I shrugged. “Maybe it meant something else, but ...”

“Well, that’s all very interesting.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and I could practically hear the tides of his thoughts break against the shore of facts as he put things together in new ways; I waited and wondered. “Hmmm. Yes, Kiera, it’s all very interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think I have the rest of it. And then some.”

“And then some?”

“Yeah, I got more than I wanted. But never mind that, it doesn’t matter. Can you put it together?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Well, let’s see what we have. We have Fyres murdered, and someone desperate to hide that fact. We have companies he was into falling like Teckla at the Wall of Baritt’s Tomb. We have someone, or someones, in the Empire desperate to hide the fact that Fyres was murdered. Am I doing all right so far?”

“Yep. Keep going.”

“Okay. We have Jhereg involvement with Fyres, and Imperial involvement with the banks, and—wait a minute.”

“Yes?”

“Fyres owed the Jhereg. Fyres owed the banks. The banks and the Jhereg were depending on Fyres. The Empire was protecting the banks, and the banks were supporting the Empire. Have I got it?”

“Right. Conclusion?”

“The Empire is working with the Jhereg.”

“Exactly,” said Vlad. “Supporting the Jhereg, borrowing from the Jhereg, and, probably, using the Jhereg.”

“Just as you were saying.”

“Yeah, I guess it all seemed to be heading that way. But push it a little further, Kiera: what would the empire do if word of the Jhereg’s influence in the Empire was about to emerge into the public?”

I shrugged. “Everything it could to hide that fact.”

“Everything?”

I nodded. “Yes. Or, if it’s what you want, everything including covering up the Fyres murder, and even—yes, and even murdering their own investigator if they thought he was no longer reliable.”