Steven Brust - Hawk

“Yeah,” I said. “But I prefer being able to find you to collect the favor you owe me.”

He looked even more frightened, and seemed very close to bolting. “What do you want me to do?”

I said, “Nothing just now. I may need some help in the future though. What do you do besides cutting purses?”

“I dive and salvage some,” he said.

I smiled. “Do you indeed? Well. If I need some diving and salvaging, or a purse cut, how do I find you?”

He told me a few places he could usually be found, and I told him that a Jhereg might come looking for him, then sent him on his way. It was a minor stroke of good luck, as such things go, but it turned out to help.

I went back to arranging to make contact with my old friend Kiera the Thief.

It was long, slow, and painful to get into each of the places I wanted to leave a message without taking more chances than necessary; but not all that interesting to relate, so let’s just say I did it, and by the time I was done I was seriously hungry-for apples or anything else. I stayed on major streets and hung with big crowds as much as I could while heading past Malak Circle to Windchime Market, and from there north to a tiny place called, appropriately, Tiny’s, where they made a decent if not outstanding peppered breaded kethna. The real attraction, though, was across the street where there was a smaller place selling baked cinnamon apples filled with sweetened flavored iced cream; fresh apples when in season, dried when not. Kiera had heard me talking about it often, and I was pretty sure she’d take the hint.

Good news: She had. Bad news: She’d gotten the message sooner than I’d calculated on, so I didn’t have time for the kethna.

She smiled and kissed my cheek. Somehow, she never made it seem like she had to bend over to kiss me, even though she did. “Hello, Vlad.”

“Kiera. You look wonderful. You haven’t changed at all.”

That was a sort of joke, by the way; Dragaerans live for a couple of thousand years if someone like me doesn’t kill them first. Kiera either missed the joke or ignored it. She said, “Are you safe here?”

“Not terribly. But I needed to see you.”

She looked around. “Maybe another place?”

“Loiosh and Rocza are watching; this is about as safe as it gets. The Jhereg would have real problems setting something up here, even if I were spotted. Although-eh, never mind.”

“Although what, Vlad?”

“They’ve taken a couple of tries without any set-up. Just random attacks, hoping for the best. As you can see, I lived.”

“You look pale. Were you wounded?”

“A bit.”

“Vlad, you need to be careful.”

“Yeah, well.”

“All right. You know best.”

“You haven’t been speaking to Loiosh.”

She chuckled politely. “What’s been going on?”

“Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

“Yes. The whole organization.”

“That isn’t what I mean. I know they want me, but someone wants me even more.”

“I’m listening.”

“They took some random shots at me.”

“So you said.”

“Sloppy stuff-just finding me and taking a whack. That isn’t how it’s done.”

She nodded; even though she wasn’t an assassin herself, she knew how this sort of thing was generally handled. “Go on.”

“Unless I’m completely missing what’s going on-which is possible, but not likely-they used at least eight guys. And they were Jhereg, not hired Orca. I mean, they were getting paid.”

“Eight?”

“Eight. Following me, taking shots two at a time, following me to the next place. Yeah.”

“Eight?”

“At least.”

“That’s…”

“I know.”

“Think it’s something personal?”

“Could be. Someone is behind it, and it’s costing that guy a lot. A whole lot. It’s a bad investment. A bad gamble.”

She nodded. “Who do you think it is?”

“No idea, no good way to find out.”

“I could ask around.”

“And?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Probably nothing.”

I said, “Anyway, that brings us to this meeting.”

“What do you need? If I can do it, Vlad, you know I will. What is it?”

“A couple of things. First, I need the Jhereg shaken up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need them talking about something that isn’t me. There’ll be rumors flying around about me-I know, because I’m going to start them-and at the same time, there has to be something else going on that takes their attention. Something big. I need them wondering about me, and looking away at the same time.”

“Well, you could always kill someone high up in the Organization. That generally does it.”

I winced. “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not terribly partial to, you know, just killing someone for effect.”

“I could steal the Jhereg treasury.”

I chuckled. “That didn’t work out so well the last time someone did it.”

She spread her hands.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“What else do you need?” she said.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “A long time ago-by my standards-”

“So, a few years?”

“Yeah. About eight years, nine years. And the incident in question must have been a hundred or so before that.”

“Wait. What?”

“Sorry. Eight or so years ago you made a reference to an incident that had happened a hundred years or so before that.”

“I keep forgetting what a good memory you have.”

“I have a terrible memory, Kiera.”

“You have a good memory for the oddest things. All right. What incident?”

“You mentioned a phoenix made of gold jade.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“Was I drunk?”

“A little.”

“All right. What about it?”

“You were talking about the lock on the display case.”

“I remember that lock.”

“And you mentioned using an enchanted lockpick.”

“I must have been really drunk,” said Kiera.

* * *

I was going to need Kiera’s enchanted lockpick.

I need to explain.

I got this story from Kiera, and most of the names are probably wrong because she was drunk and most likely lying about them. But that’s fine because you don’t need to know the names anyway; I just want you to understand a bit of the background, all right? If all the names and stuff confuse you, forget it; that isn’t the point.

It was never about stealing the jade. Not that gold jade isn’t beautiful, and three-quarters of a pound of it was worth a fortune even before Nescaffi had put his genius to it. But stealing the jade was only a means to an end. There was a man named Scaanil who coveted anything and everything by Nescaffi. It was all about Scaanil, and that made it about the jade.

Which made it about the lock on the display case.

Nedev, who owned the jade phoenix, had good taste in art, and a lot of money; the case had been designed by Tudin of Threehills, which meant Kiera was far and away the best choice to steal it, if she could be persuaded to take the job. She could.

The enchantment that secured the lock was by Heffesca of Longlake, which sent Kiera to Litra.

Litra wasn’t the name she was born with; she took it five hundred years ago when she moved to Adrilankha. No one knew where she came from or who she was before. She had the dark complexion and sharp features of the House of the Hawk, though of course she was now a Jhereg. She took the name Litra, which was the Dragaeran form of a Serioli word that means “to scrounge.”

Litra lived in the Captain’s Corner district, surrounded by the ramshackle dwellings of petty merchants. Her own home blended in, but in fact it continued down more than fifty feet below street level, and it was in the subbasements that Litra did her work. Since the Interregnum, she was known as one of the best at what she did.