Steven Brust - Orca

“That’s my intention,” I said.

She waited. Loiosh and Rocza sat on my shoulders like statues, drawing stares from everyone in the place except her. That was all right. I said, “I’m betting a great deal on a single glance, Ensign.”

She waited.

I said, “The Surveillance Corps and the Tasks Group. I’m betting that you’re with the latter and that Lieutenant Domm is in the former, and I’m basing this guess just on the way you looked at him that time at the Riversend. Care to tell me if I’m right?”

“You talk,” she said. “I’ll listen.”

“Okay.” I was beginning to think she didn’t like me. “My name is Vladimir Taltos. I used to work for the Jhereg, now I’m being hunted by the Jhereg.” I stopped to give her a chance to respond, if she cared to.

“Keep talking,” she said.

“There’s a boy, a Teckla boy. He has brain fever—”

“Stay on the subject.”

“If you want to know what’s happening, Ensign, don’t interrupt. He has brain fever. I’ve arranged for him to be cured. The woman who’s working on him is a victim of a very minor land swindle that you may or may not know about, but it’s what led me into this. I believe I need some wine.”

She got the attention of the host, who had a servant bring a bottle and two glasses. I poured some for myself, Timmer declined. I drank and my throat felt better. “The land swindle isn’t really important,” I said, “but it is, as I said, the piece of the whole thing that got me involved. And it isn’t even a swindle, really—I’m not certain it’s illegal. It’s just a means of putting some pressure on a few people and raising prices a little—inducing panic. In an atmosphere of general panic, where everyone is wondering how bad he’s going to be hit, everyone is susceptible to—”

“Go on, please.”

“You know how the land thing works?”

“Go on.”

“I don 7 think she likes you, boss.”

“What was your first clue, Loiosh?”

I collected my thoughts. Someday I hope to have them all. I said, “Let’s start with Fyres, then. I assume you’ve heard of him.”

“Don’t be sarcastic with me, Easterner.”

Her hand was casually near her dagger. I nodded. “Lord Fyres,” I said, “duke of—of whatever it is. Sixty million imperials’ worth of fraud, left to a not-grieving widow, a son who probably doesn’t even notice, a daughter who intends to continue the tradition, and another daughter who—but we’ll get to her. Fyres was worth about sixty million, as I said, and almost none of it was real, except for a bit that he’d put into legitimate shipbuilding and shipping companies, most of whom have now gone belly-up, as the Orca say.

“Now, Ensign, allow me to do some speculating. Most of what I have is based on fact, but some of it is guesswork based on the rest. Feel free to correct me if I say something you know is wrong.”

“Go ahead.”

“All right. Fyres was getting fatter and fatter, and more and more large banks were involved, and many of them—many of the biggest—were so heavily involved that, when he came to them and said he’d need another fifty dots—excuse me, fifty thousand imperials—or he’d go under, they had no choice but to give it to him, because if he defaulted on his loans, the banks would go under, too, or at least be pretty seriously crippled. This included the Bank of the Empire, the Orca Treasury, and the Dragon Treasury, as well as some very large banks and some extremely powerful Jhereg about whom I suspect you don’t care but you ought to.”

“Stony?”

“No, oddly enough. As far as I know, he wasn’t directly in debt to Fyres at all. But, yeah, he’s in this—mostly because he wasn’t in debt.”

“How is that?”

“Wait. I’ll get to it.”

She nodded. I tried to read her expression, to see how she was taking this, but she wasn’t giving me anything. So be it, then.

“Eventually Lord Shortisle realized what was going on. One of his accountants found out first, but agreed not to say anything about the bank he knew was in jeopardy. He did this, you understand, in fine old Orca tradition, in exchange for having his pocket lined.” I considered, then said, “Maybe several of them did this, but I only know about one. And that poor bastard had no idea what scale this was on, or he wouldn’t have tried it. For all I know, this was happening all through Shortisle’s department, but it doesn’t matter, because eventually Shortisle found out about it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, frankly. I suspect he has ways of knowing when his accountants are spending more money than they ought to; it was probably something like that.”

She shrugged. “All right. Go on, then.”

I nodded. “So Shortisle spoke to this mysterious accountant. I’m speculating now, I don’t know the accountant’s name, but I’m sure he was important in Shortisle’s organization because Vonnith always referred to him as a ‘big shot.’ At a guess, then, the conversation went something like this: Shortisle bitched him out, and informed him he was dismissed from the Ministry and was probably going to face criminal charges. The accountant said that if he was dismissed, the news would come out about why he was dismissed and the bank would fail. Shortisle asked why he should care about one bank. The accountant, who by now had at least a glimmer of what was going on, pointed out that, once that bank failed, others might, and maybe Shortisle should find how big the problem was before creating a scandal that would result in a general loss of confidence. Shortisle was forced to agree that this was a good idea.

“So our man from the Ministry of the Treasury starts looking into things, and finds Vonnith, or maybe someone like her, and discovers that every bank she owns or runs is in danger of collapse because everything she has—on paper—is tied into someone named Fyres. So he checks on Fyres to see who else is into him, and discovers that everyone and his partner is in the same position, and that it’s getting worse.” I paused. “The only reason I know about Vonnith is that she happens to own the bank that the old woman I’m trying to help saved at. There are probably scores of bankers in the same position she’s in, and she only gained importance because of me.”

“I don’t follow you,” she said.

“Never mind. You’ll see.”

“Continue, then.” Her hand was still resting near the dagger, but she seemed interested now.

I nodded and said, “So Shortisle pays Fyres a visit—”

“How much of this do you know?” she said. “Are you still speculating?”

“Yes. This is almost all speculation. But it holds up with what’s happened. Bear with me and I’ll try to draw all the connections.”

“All right. Go on, then.”

“He pays Fyres a visit to find out what can be done. Fyres is intractable. He tries to bribe Shortisle, he tries to dazzle him, he tries to sell him. He doesn’t get away with it, because, by now, Shortisle knows Fyres’s history, and he also knows, or is starting to know, how big this is. So he threatens to have Fyres brought down. Now, this is a bluff, Ensign. Shortisle can’t bring Fyres down, because it would bring down too many others and create chaos in the finances of the Empire, and it’s Shortisle’s job to prevent exactly that. What Shortisle wants is for Fyres to work with him in trying to ease out of this with as little damage as possible, and the threat is just to get Fyres’s attention so they can start negotiating. But the threat backfires—”

“Still speculation? It almost sounds as if you were listening to them.”

“Just bear with me. I may have a lot of the details wrong, but I know that Shortisle paid Fyres a visit. Chances are the conversation didn’t go like that, but the results are the same as if it had, so I’m trying to show you how it might have ended up the way it did. And, by the way, with what I know about Shortisle and Fyres, I might not be all that wrong.”