Iorich (34 page)

She stared at me. I really, really should learn not to bait Dragonlords. It’s a bad habit, and one of these days it could get me into trouble. But it’s so much
fun
. I cleared my throat and said, “You know where to be, and when?”

“Yes. I’m to make sure no one tries to prevent Morrolan and the advocate from reaching Her Majesty.”

I nodded.

“That’s it, then,” I said. I checked the time. I could make it if I hurried.

“Good luck, Vlad,” said Morrolan. Kiera just smiled her smile. Daymar was lost in thought. Norathar shrugged. They all got up, one at a time, and filed out. When I was alone, I pulled the dagger from my boot and studied it and tested it. It was a stiletto, my favorite weapon for making someone become dead. My favorite target, when possible, is the left eye, because it is back there that Dragaerans keep the part of their brains that permits psychic activity. Not that I’m necessarily trying to cut off psychic activity, but if you take it out, they go into shock instantly. That takes a weapon with reasonable length, and a good point. This one had that, though the edge wasn’t anything to brag about.

But I had no time to sharpen it just now. I replaced it in my boot, tested the draw, didn’t like it, and ended up arranging a quick rig against my stomach on the left side, hidden by my cloak. I tested it, and it worked, and it didn’t hurt much more than a whole lot. Fair enough.

I set out for the Stone Bridge, cutting around the Palace district, Loiosh and Rocza keeping an eye on the foot traffic to make sure no one was interested in my movements.

I was a bit distracted: For one thing, it hurt to move. For another, the trickiest part of the whole matter was just coming up. I thought about asking Cawti to help, but I had the impression a recommendation from her might not go over well with these people. I thought up several possible stories and rejected them.

I still hadn’t made up my mind when I got near the cottage.

“Check.”

“On it, Boss.”
And,
“Different guy, same spot.”

“All right.”

I stood behind an oak that would have taken three of me to wrap my arms around, and I rubbed a bit of stuff onto my skin, glued on the beard, and set the wig in place.

“What do we do?”

“Your choice: cloak, or outside.”

“Neither?”

“Loiosh.”

“Cloak, I guess.”

“Get in, then.”

They did. I approached the cottage and remembered to pound on the door with my fist, instead of clapping. That hurt, too.

The door opened, and a middle-aged woman, Easterner, opened the door. I couldn’t guess from looking which part of the East she drew her ancestry; she had a large mouth, and wide-set eyes that were almost perfectly round, like a cat’s. The look in the eyes, at the moment, was suspicious. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m called Savn,” I said, pulling the name more or less out of the air. “I’d like a few minutes of conversation with you before the gathering here, if you don’t mind.”

“How do you know about the gathering here?”

“That’s the voice, Boss. The one doing most of the talking.”

“All right.”

“I’m hearing double, Boss. Can I—?”

“All right.”

There came the psychic equivalent of a relieved sigh.

I said, “Many people know about the gathering here, and the one later with Lord Caltho.”

“Everyone knows about that one.”

“Yes, including some people you would probably rather didn’t.”

“The Empire?”

“Worse.”

She studied me for a moment, then said, “Come in.”

It was bigger than it had seemed from outside: one big room, with a stove in one corner, and a loft overhead that I’m sure contained the sleeping quarters. There were a lot of plain wooden chairs set out—at least twenty of them. I suspected the chairs accounted for most of the expense of the place.

She pointed me to one. I sat; she remained standing. Heh. Okay, so that’s how it was going to be.

“Boss, should you be talking out loud? Here? If I could listen—”

“Um. Damn. Good point.”

“Mind if we take a walk?” I said. She looked even more suspicious. I said, “The Empire may be hearing everything we say here, and, worse, someone else might be, too.”

She frowned, hesitated, then nodded abruptly. I stood up, we walked out the door and down the street. When we were a good distance away, I started talking, but she interrupted before I had a word out.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I gave you my name. What’s yours?”

“Brinea. Now who are you?”

“I’m what you’d call an independent factor. I’m not with the Empire—” she looked like she didn’t believe that “—or with anyone else. I have a friend who’s caught in the middle of it, which means I’m temporarily on your side.”

“My side is—”

“Spare me,” I said. “I have information you’ll want to
know, and no interest whatever in politics, whether Imperial or anti-Imperial.”

She pressed her lips together and said, “What information is that?”

“Is today’s meeting, here, to plan for the meeting with Caltho?”

“That’s a question, not information.”

“All right. If it is, there is liable to be a disguised Jhereg assassin here, who is planning to kill Caltho and blame it on you.”

I suddenly had her attention. “Talk,” she said.

We turned a corner; with Loiosh and Rocza still in the cloak, I felt exposed, but I tried to stay alert. I only saw a few Easterners.

“The Jhereg,” I told her, “is working on a complicated scheme, along with the Orca and the—and another organization. To pull it off, they need to pressure the Empress. To pressure the Empress, they’re using the massacre in Tirma. If a legitimate investigation—”

“It won’t be a legitimate investigation,” she said. “They’ll just throw a black tarp over it and say it’s fine.”

“No, they’ll do a real investigation. Not because they care, but because the Empress is trying to get out of a jam, and that’s the only way to do it.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“The Jhereg needs to stop the investigation. To do that, they’re going to make it look like your group killed Assistant Investigator Caltho. Much outrage against you, probably a lot of arrests, and the investigation gets put on hold. That’s how they’re going to work it.”

She was quiet for ten or twelve paces, then she said, “Maybe.”

“I agree with the maybe. I think I’m right, but I could be wrong.”

“How will you find out?”

“With your permission, I’ll attend today’s meeting here, and try to identify the assassin.”

“What makes you think you can do that?”

“I can sometimes spot them,” I said.

“What is it you do?”

“Run from them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Jhereg wants me dead for personal reasons. So, most of my life is avoiding them. But that’s okay, I’ve been running for so long it feels like walking to me.”

She was quiet again for a bit, then she said, “What will you do if you identify the assassin?”

“Tell you who he is, so you can do whatever seems appropriate.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I won’t be. I might not be able to spot him, but if I do spot him, I won’t be wrong.”

We turned a corner and she started leading us back toward the house. No one had yet tried to kill me. Eventually she said, “All right. I’ll trust you on that part. You may as well relax; they’ll be here soon.”

We made it back to the house and closed the door and I felt relieved. I found a chair from which I could be watching the door without appearing to, and I waited.

It was, indeed, only a few minutes later that they began to arrive. The first to arrive appeared to be a Teckla, and suspiciously like one straight out of someone’s imagination of what a peasant ought to look like: brown hair, roundish face, leathery-looking
skin, sturdy. He greeted Brinea, who introduced me. He gave his name as Nicha, and sat down next to me and began a conversation about needing to watch for trickery at the meeting with the Empire. I grunted agreeing noises and kept watching the door.

Shortly after, a pair of Easterners came in: Katherine was tall for an Easterner, dark, and wore glasses; Liam had the round face of a Teckla, an odd hair color that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown, and a nose that looked to have been broken at least once. They carried flyers in their hands. I didn’t ask to see one because I was afraid it was something I was supposed to know about. They were both reserved with me; maybe they thought they should be the only humans there.

In fact, except for the three of us, everyone else was a Teckla. I won’t give you all the names; there were twenty-three of them, not including me or Brinea. Eliminating the two Easterners, that meant twenty-one who might be assassins. Nine of them were women, and I almost dismissed them, but for one thing, there
is
the occasional woman working for the Jhereg (as I happen to know better than most), and for another, a Jhereg willing to disguise himself as a Teckla could just as easily disguise his sex, right?

So, there were twenty-one who might be my target; and none of them instantly jumped out at me. I had been thinking I might take a look at their calluses, if I could see them; but it seems I’d stumbled into the largest collection of non-laboring Teckla ever assembled in one place. Some were messengers, some were house-servants, some did menial jobs for merchants, but none looked like he actually did any work. It was terribly disillusioning; I wondered what it meant.

It seemed there were several there who didn’t know each other, so my being a stranger turned out not to be that bad.
Brinea made introductions as people came in, and I watched a lot, spoke little, learned nothing.

“I wish I could see, Boss.”

“You think you can spot an assassin when I can’t?”

“Yes.”

“Ha.”

The chairs were arranged in most of a circle, three rows deep, only an arc in front of the doorway and into the kitchen area left free. One chair, on the other end of the arc, was unoccupied, as if by unspoken consent. Brinea sat in it and said, “Let’s get started.”

It started, and it went on for a long time. They spoke of pressuring the Empire, which struck me as an exercise in futility, but what do I know? They spoke about guarding the interests of “the people,” but weren’t exactly clear on what that involved. Mostly, it went on for a long time. I took out the clasp knife I’d just bought. No one reacted. Damn. I cleaned my nails with it, and no one seemed to notice. Nothing. Oh, well. I closed it and set down next to my chair.

Meanwhile, they droned on, talking about what Lord Caltho—they were careful to call him Lord Caltho—had to be told about and what standards he had to be held to, and about insisting that all details of the investigation be made public.
Let me know how that works out for you,
I thought but didn’t say.

I was caught between boredom and frustration. I kept wanting to flourish a dagger just to see who reacted; and it might even have worked. But the thing is, it might not have, and then I’d have lost my chance.

It took a while—it took a very very long while—but at last Brinea said, “I think that covers everything. I propose we go there in a body. If we leave now, we’ll be a few minutes early,
and we can talk to anyone walking by and explain what we’re doing, then go in together. Does anyone object?”

No one did, so we all stood up. I watched as closely as I could to see if anyone seemed unusually athletic or, well,
slinky
when standing, if that makes any sense. And I half thought I noticed someone, too. I studied him as I stood: a guy with long, loopy arms wearing loose clothing; and his hair was shaggy enough to have maybe concealed a noble’s point. Maybe. The trick was to keep an eye on him, but not be so distracted that I missed someone else. It was hard, but not impossible. You have to trust your peripheral vision.

I contrived to be the last one out the door except for Brinea and a fellow I took to be her husband. No one else seemed interested in who was the last one out the door. But I guess if you’d been watching me, I wouldn’t have
seemed
interested either.

We all trooped out toward the street to head toward the South Adrilankha Speaker’s Hall, which is what someone had once built instead of the Speaker’s House villages have. It wasn’t far away, but at least one of us wasn’t going to make it. They waited for Brinea to take the lead, and, as she shut the door, I said, “I don’t have my pocketknife.”

“You set it by your chair,” said a short, elderly Teckla who was about four paces from me.

We assassins notice things like that.

I nodded and opened my cloak as I covered the distance. Loiosh and Rocza flew out very quickly and several people cried out, but by that time I had the stiletto in my hand. I got him up under the chin. I hit him hard, too—I remember feeling the hilt connect with his chin bone, though I mostly remember how much my ribs hurt when I struck. I left the knife
there, and started to step back, about to curl myself up into a ball of pain and try to breathe when—