The Book of Taltos by Steven Brust

  I stood and stepped through the window.

  Same hallway, same confusion of distance and dimension due to the featureless white. This time there was no black cat to guide me, however. I wondered which way to go, and I wondered, too, if it mattered. There was no window behind me. Loiosh shifted on my shoulder and said, “That way feels right, boss.” On reflection, it felt right to me, too, so I sheathed the dagger and began walking.

  The mist never appeared, either, so perhaps that had been arranged for my benefit; the Demon Goddess seemed to me quite capable of theatrics. No mist, no cat, no sound, but the doors appeared much sooner than they had the last time. In a way, it would be oddest if that corridor really was just a corridor, of some fixed length, and it took however long to walk it depending on where one appeared.

  This time, standing before the doors, I studied the carvings a bit. At first glance, they seemed to be abstract designs, yet as I looked I began to pick out or imagine shapes: trees, a mountain, a pair of wheels, what might have been a man with a hole in his chin, something else that might have been a fanciful four-legged beast with a tentacle where its nose ought to be and a pair of horns emerging from its mouth, perhaps an ocean below what I’d thought was a mountain but now seemed to be a stick supporting a circular blob.

  I shook my head, looked again, and they were all abstract designs again. Who knows how much was there and how much I’d supplied?

  For lack of anything else to do, I clapped at the doors and waited for one very, very long minute. I clapped once more and waited again. I still had my link to the Orb, and I thought of seeing if I could force or blow the doors open, but then I thought better of it.

  “Good thinking, boss.”

  “Shut up, Loiosh. Do you have any great ideas?”

  “Yes. Strike it with your fists, like Easterners are supposed to.”

  “And if there are defensive spells on it to destroy anyone who touches it?”

  “Good point. There’s always Spellbreaker.”

  I nodded. That was an idea. I stood there like an idiot a little longer, then sighed and let the gold chain fall into my left hand. I swung it around, then stopped. “Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea.”

  “You have to do something, boss. If you’re worried about protections, hit it with Spellbreaker. If not, either strike it or just see if it will push open.”

  I considered for a while, then got mad at myself for standing there like an idiot. Before I could come to my senses, I whirled the chain around and lashed out at the door. It hit with a clank of metal against wood which instantly died out. There were no sensations, I felt no sorcery, and, fortunately, Spellbreaker left no mark on the door.

  I pushed the right-hand door, and it creaked a bit but barely moved. However, when it swung back, there was a gap between the two doors sufficient for my fingers. I pulled the door, which was as heavy as it seemed, and it slowly opened enough for me to slip inside.

  As I walked forward, I saw the shimmer and sparkle in the air that I’d seen before at Verra’s appearance and disappearance. It occurred to me that perhaps that was how it would look to an observer when I stepped through to her realm.

  In the time it took to form those thoughts, she had arrived. Her eyes followed me as I approached her throne, and when I got near, the cat, whom I hadn’t noticed against the folds of her white gown, jumped down and inspected me. Loiosh tensed on my shoulder.

  “There’s something about that cat, boss . . . .”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me a bit, Loiosh.”

  I stopped at a convenient distance before her throne and waited to see if she would speak first. Just when I was deciding that she wouldn’t, she said, “You’re getting blood on my floor.”

  I looked down. Yes, indeed, my palm was still bleeding, and the blood was running down Spellbreaker, which still hung from my left hand, and was slowly splattering onto the white tiles. I turned my palm over, and Spellbreaker came to life, as it has done every now and then before, to hold itself upright, like a yendi about to strike. There was a tingling in my hand then that ran up my arm, and as I watched, the cut stopped bleeding and closed up, leaving a faint pink scar.

  I hadn’t known Spellbreaker could do that.

  I carefully wrapped it around my left arm again and said, “Shall I scrub the floor for you?”

  “Perhaps later.”

  I looked for traces of humor on her long, strange face, but didn’t see any. I did, however, identify what made her face seem so odd: Her eyes were set too high. Not by much, you understand, but the bridge of her nose was ever so slightly lower on her forehead than on a human or a Dragaeran. The more I studied it, the stranger it seemed. I turned away from her.

  “Why have you come here?” she said.

  Still looking away, I said, “To question you.”

  “Some might believe that presumptuous.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m just that kind of guy.”

  “Apparently. Ask, then.”

  I turned back to her. “Goddess, I asked before why you chose me to kill the King of Greenaere. Perhaps you answered me fully, perhaps not. Now I ask this: Why was it necessary that he die?”

  Her eyes caught mine and held them, and I trembled in spite of myself. If she was trying to intimidate me, she succeeded. If she was trying to convince me to withdraw the question, she failed. At last she said, “For the good of the people in the Empire, both Dragaerans and Easterners.”

  “Bully,” I said. “Can you be more specific about that? So far, the results have been the death of the crew of a Dragaeran freighter and the arrest of several Easterners, including my wife.”

  “What?” she said, her eyebrows rising. I don’t think I was really, truly frightened until then, until I realized that I had surprised her. That was when my stomach twisted itself into knots and my mouth went dry.

  “The organization of which my wife is a member—”

  “What of them? Were they all arrested?”

  “The leaders, at least. This Kelly, my wife, several others.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know? I suppose because they refused conscription, and—”

  “Refused conscription? That fool. The whole point was—” She cut herself off abruptly.

  “Was what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I underestimated this man’s arrogance.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” I said. “You underestimated—”

  “Quiet,” she said, snapping the word out like an arrow past my ear. “I must consider what to do to rectify my error.”

  “Just what were you trying to do, anyway?”

  She stared at me. “I do not choose to tell you at this time.”

  I said, “It was all directed at Kelly’s people in the first place, wasn’t it?”

  “Kelly, as I’ve said, is a fool.”

  “Maybe, but judging by what happened before, he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Certainly he does, in a narrow field. He is a social scientist, if you will, and a very skilled one in certain ways. He studied—it doesn’t matter.”

  “Tell me.” I don’t know what got into me that caused me to start interrogating her like a button-man who’d been sloughing off, but I did it.

  Her mouth twitched. “Very well. During the Interregnum, when your people—Easterners—roamed over the Empire like jhereg on a dragon’s corpse—”

  “Yum.”

  “Shut up.”

  “—many vaults were unearthed that had lain buried and forgotten for so long that you cannot conceive of the time. Some of these were records preserved by the House of the Lyorn, who have the skill to preserve things that ought to be allowed to crumble away. Or perhaps we should not blame them—it’s been said that one cannot kill ideas.”

  “What ideas were unearthed?”

  “Many, my dear assassin. It was an amazing time of growth, those four hundred and ninety-seven years of interregnum. Sorcery was all but impossible then, so that only
the most skilled could perform even the simplest spells. Conversely, this skill was passed on and retained, and taught to those whose interest ran in that direction. What was the result? Now, when the Orb is back, sorcery has grown so strong from the new skills that what was inconceivable before the Interregnum, and impossible during it, is now commonplace. Teleportation on such a level that some fear it will replace trade by ship and road. War magics so strong that some believe the individual fighter will soon become a thing of the past. Even resurrection of the dead has become possib—”

  “What has this to do with Kelly?”

  “Eh? My apologies, impatient Easterner. Things were discovered by your people, during that time, things that go all the way back to those who first discovered this world.”

  “The Jenoine?”

  “Before the Jenoine.”

  “Who—?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But ideas that have been preserved far too long, and from another place, lay dormant until then. And even when they were unearthed, no one understood them for nearly two hundred years, until this Kelly—”

  “Goddess, I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “Kelly has his hands on the truth about the way a society works, about where the power is, and the cause of the injustice he sees. But it is truth for another time and another place. He has built an organization around these ideas, and because of their truth, his organization prospers. But the truth he has based his policies on, the fuel for this fire he is building, has no such strength in the Empire. Perhaps in ten thousand years, or a hundred thousand, but not now. And by proceeding as he has, he is setting up his people to be massacred. Do you understand? He is building a world of ideas with no foundation beneath them. When they collapse . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Why don’t you tell him so?”

  “I have. He doesn’t believe me.”

  “Why don’t you kill him?”

  “You don’t kill ideas like that by killing the one who espouses them. As fertilizer aids the growth of the tree, so does blood—”

  “So,” I said, “you decided to start a war, thinking they’d march off and forget their grievances so they could fight for their homeland? That doesn’t—”

  “Kelly,” she said, “is smarter than I thought he was, curse him. He’s smart enough to destroy every Easterner, and most of the Teckla, in South Adrilankha.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Consider the matter,” she said.

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “I’m sending you home at once. I need to consider this.” She gestured with her right hand, and I found myself, once more, before a window in Morrolan’s tower. The window looked upon the face of the Demon Goddess, who stared at me and said, “Try to stay out of trouble, will you?”

  The window faded to black.

  Lesson 9

  Making Friends I

  MORROLAN AND ALIERA WERE where I’d left them, Norathar had gone. I checked through the Orb and discovered that I’d been gone less than two hours, and most of that time had been taken up walking to and from the tower. I sat down and said, “I’ll take that refill of wine now.”

  Morrolan poured it and said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What happened? I should judge that you have just had a moving experience of some sort.”

  “Yes. Well. I suppose. I haven’t discovered anything that will help get Cawti out of the Imperial Dungeons.”

  Aliera shifted. “Did you see Verra?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say, then?”

  “Many things, Aliera. It doesn’t matter.”

  Morrolan considered me, probably wondering whether he ought to push for more information. I guess he decided not to. Aliera was frowning.

  “Well, then,” said Aliera, after a moment. “We’re back to planning another jailbreak. We’ve been doing quite a bit of that lately. I wonder if the Cards would have predicted it, had I thought to attempt a reading.”

  “I don’t think a jailbreak is in order,” I said.

  Aliera turned her blue eyes on me. “Why not?”

  “If Cawti won’t accept an Imperial pardon, what makes you think she’ll accept being broken out by force?”

  Aliera shrugged. “We’ll have to get the whole batch of them, that’s all.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think they’ll go. I think they want to stay in prison until they’re all released together.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’ve spoken to them. That’s how they think.”

  “They’re nuts,” said Aliera.

  “That’s more true than you know,” I said. “Or less.”

  “And so,” said Morrolan, who had never looked happy about the notion of breaking into the Imperial Dungeons, “what do you suggest?”

  “I’m not certain. I’ll have to think about it. But I know what I’m going to do first: find out just what, by the blood on Verra’s floor, is going on in South Adrilankha.”

  “Blood on Verra’s floor?” said Morrolan. “I don’t think I’ve heard that oath before.”

  “No,” I said. “You probably haven’t.”

  THE NEXT DAY WAS going to be short. That is, it was the day before the Festival of the New Year, so most people quit working around noon. I kept all of my people working, since Holy Days are some of our best times, but I gave them all bonuses. I had no idea if either of the people I needed to see was going to be working all day, some of the day, or not at all, so I awoke much earlier than usual. I broke my fast and spent some time throwing things for the jhereg to snatch out of the air and fight over.

  “Loiosh, Rocza seems funny. Is she pregnant?”

  “Huh? No, boss. At least, I don’t think so. I mean, the way things work—”

  “Never mind. What is it, then?”

  “Well, you know she’s been a little closer to Cawti than I have, so, I mean—”

  “Oh, I get it. All right.”

  I slugged down my klava, dressed, collected Loiosh and Rocza, and headed out for my first errand. Aibynn was in the blue room but hadn’t stirred. I envied him.

  Kelly’s group had moved twice since the last time I’d visited their headquarters, and this last place was a great deal different from the others. Up until now they’d met in a flat that two or three of them lived in, but they’d recently found an empty storefront not too far from one of the farmer’s markets that appeared irregularly all over South Adrilankha. Whatever windows it once had were boarded up, either as a painfully inadequate defensive gesture or because they couldn’t afford oiled paper or window glass. I stood there for a while and considered. As always when visiting the Easterners’ part of town, I felt a slight relaxation of tension, but this time it was hardly noticeable as I studied the low, wood-frame building.

  It was pretty obvious, once you got near it, both for the banner hung across the front that read “Stop Press Gangs!” and for the troop of Phoenix Guards who stood across the street from it, silent and ominous, ignoring the dirty looks they got from passersby. As Cawti had said, they all seemed to be Dragonlords and Dzur. That is, they were professionals, not conscripted Teckla, which meant there’d be no reasoning with them, and they’d fight well.

  But never mind that. I watched from down the street where I could keep an eye on both the Phoenix Guards and whoever went through the door of the storefront. Eventually someone I recognized went in. I left my place, waved cheerfully to the goldcloaks, and followed him in.

  He greeted me with all the warmth I remembered from our previous encounters. “You,” he said.

  “My dear Paresh,” I told him. “How is it that they didn’t arrest you, too? No, no, let me guess. They only hauled in the Easterners. Either they decided that a Dragaeran, even if a Teckla, doesn’t deserve prison, or they decided that a Teckla, even if a Dragaeran, must be harmless. Am I right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “My wife back. How
do you propose to get her out of prison?”

  “We will be giving a demonstration of our strength tomorrow. We expect five thousand Easterners and Teckla, all of them committed to fighting until conscription stops and our friends are released. Many of them are determined to fight until the Empire itself is run by us, and for us. Do you have all that, or shall I repeat it?”

  “I’ll read it back to you: You aren’t doing anything except shouting at each other about how mad you are and hoping the Empress laughs herself to death.”

  “She didn’t laugh much a few weeks ago, when she pulled the troops out of South Adrilankha.”

  “They are, however, back.”

  “For the moment. But if we have to shut down—”

  “Shut down your mouth, Paresh. I came here to find out if you had any plans for getting my wife out of the Imperial Dungeons. It seems you don’t. That’s all I wanted to know. Good day.”

  As I turned away, he said, “Baronet Taltos,” and put such scorn into my title that I almost dropped him right then and there. I didn’t, but I did stop and turn back to face him. He said, “Consider how your wife will react if you find some way to yendi her out of prison, while everyone else stays there. Think it over.”

  I felt a sneer growing on my face, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him see it. I walked out the door and headed back toward my own side of town, where everyone hated me for reasons I was more comfortable with.

  ALL RIGHT, SO I couldn’t count on them. I hadn’t really thought I could, but they deserved to be asked. Where did that leave me? Nowhere, probably. I stopped my walk long enough to make contact with Kragar.

  “Any news?”

  “Those minstrels sure hear things, Vlad. They’re better than the street tags. They play the court, and they listen, and they gossip. That was a great idea.”

  “Save the praise, Kragar. Have we learned anything?”

  “We sure have. The big arrest of Easterners was—um, I’m not certain you’re going to like this.”