Hawk (Vlad) (7 page)

So, then.

I went back to the room I’d been sleeping in to make sure I hadn’t left anything there; I wouldn’t be coming back. I checked the dagger in my boot and the throwing knife up my sleeve, and the things on the harness. I strapped the rapier to my side with Lady Teldra just in front of it, and the various things in and under my cloak. I looked around the room again, and gave it a silent thank-you. Then, Rocza riding discontentedly on my right shoulder, I went down the hall and out, leaving the clammy mildewy stench of the basement for the stink of South Adrilankha.

I stopped to thank Auntie and tell her good-bye. She sniffed, nodded, and asked if there was anything else I needed.

“Do you know any place nearby I can get cleaned up a bit?”

“Nine doors down that way and across the street. It doesn’t look like it, but they let rooms, and they’ll have a pump and a basin. Give them a coin, and if they give you any trouble tell them I sent you.”

“All right. Good. Thanks. Also, do you have some koelsch leaves? I’m out.”

“They aren’t good for you.”

“I know. But neither is dying.”

She grunted, went into her house, and emerged with a small leather pouch. “Six coppers,” she said.

I handed her a silver coin. “Keep it,” I said.

She nodded. “Good luck,” she told me.

“Thanks.”

I followed her directions and found myself in the sort of flophouse I’d been staying in lately. I entered, flipped the landlady a coin without saying a word, and went up the stairs to use the pump room and get myself a little more prepared to face the world. Or Daymar, at least. The water was cold. They had a small mirror there, and I took some time to study myself; yeah, I still looked like me, except I now had a small white scar on my throat.

When I’d told Loiosh to have Daymar meet me “across the street,” I meant a place I’d discovered some weeks earlier, while wandering about South Adrilankha. They were called Len and Nieces, and they made klava and sold pastries. The pastries weren’t all that good, but the klava was excellent, and the baking and the roasting coffee overpowered the smells from outside. I walked down three steps and into the place with its seven identical round tables, and paused to take a deep breath before seating myself. There were two other tables occupied, both of them by old men and women—human, of course. That is, what the Dragaerans called Easterners, like me. Dragaerans refer to themselves as human, and I’m usually too polite to correct them.

The people at the tables were either the same ones I’d seen before, or the same type. One look at them, and you knew they spent all of their time here. I had mixed feelings about that: maybe it’s a useless waste to spend every minute of your life doing nothing more than sitting around gabbing; but maybe it’s not a bad thing at all. I don’t know.

Claudia—one of the nieces—brought me klava and a cream-filled sweet roll, as always without a word. She wasn’t used to people openly carrying weapons, and didn’t know what to make of me. The first time I’d come in, Len had asked me to remove my sword while I was there; I’d looked at him until he went back to his counter. Since then, it had become obvious that I made them uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like there was anything they could do about it. And I didn’t care that much. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t care that much about that, either.

The klava was even better than usual that day; the sweet roll was all right, but my brain was working too fast to give either of them the concentration they deserved. I kept checking the door for Daymar, which was pointless: it would be hours at best before Loiosh would be able to find him, assuming he was in the City.

I had to hide from the Orb while I did it,
Daymar had said.

Every citizen of the Empire is linked to the Orb. It permits sorcery and is how you can tell time, and, if you have information vital to the Empire or are really stupid, you can reach the Empress instantly and directly. The amulet I wore was powerful enough so that I couldn’t even detect the Orb if I was too far from it, but the Orb could still find me.

I knew two ways to hide from the Orb. You could give up your citizenship, and then the Orb couldn’t find you, but you wouldn’t be able to use sorcery. The other is a short-term solution: You concentrate on blanking out your mind, thinking of nothing, imagining a big, black, empty well. I’d done that once for a little while, just to see if I could, but I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off if I were in danger. In any case, neither of those methods would help in this case. But neither of them would have done Daymar any good either, so there might be a third way. If there was, it might have something to do with what Auntie had just told me about attuning one’s mind, which seemed reasonable, based on my experience with sorcery and my knowledge of witchcraft. And, if so, it might be just what I needed to set things in motion.

That’s a lot of maybes. And if it went wrong, I’d be dead. But if I did nothing, I’d be dead anyway—the last few days had convinced me of that, if nothing else.

I gestured to Claudia. She brought me more klava, still not looking at me. I guess something strange happens in the heads of Easterners when they’re around someone like me—they feel like I’m one of them, but not. Come to think of it, I feel the same way. The last time I went back East, I found out—no, skip it. I did a lot of reminiscing while I was waiting for Daymar, and I told myself the story of how I’d gotten into this mess, but you don’t need to hear about it.

I had just finished my second sweet roll—this one tartberry—and was drinking my fourth cup of klava when there was a pop of displaced air, and Daymar was sitting in front of me, floating cross-legged a few feet off the ground. Loiosh flapped over to me.

Daymar looked around. “Why are you holding a weapon?”

I got up off the floor and made the dagger vanish. “It would take too long to explain,” I explained.

I picked my chair up while Daymar seated himself in a more traditional way. By this time, there was only one table of old men—they were studiously not looking at the commotion. Len and Claudia were, in fact, staring at Daymar, but when I looked at them they got busy doing other things.

I turned to Daymar and smiled.

Part Two

W
INGS
OF
THE
H
AWK

4

M
AKING
P
LANS
OR
M
AKING
C
ONVERSATION

“Aren’t they used to having humans in here?” he asked.

I didn’t take the trouble to correct him about who the humans were because, like I said, I’m too polite. I said, “Not humans who suddenly appear in the middle of their place, no.”

“Oh,” he said. “Why not?”

“It’s not done,” I said. “In the East.”

“Oh.”

Loiosh settled on my left shoulder, Rocza on my right. I called over for a klava for Daymar; when it was delivered, he said, “It’s good to see you, Vlad.”

“You too,” I lied.

“When I saw Loiosh, I concluded that you wanted to see me.”

“Good thinking.”

“He let me get the location from his mind, so I teleported.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I was right?”

I nodded.

He sat back, tilted his head, and waited.

“I wanted to ask you about something,” I said.

He nodded. “All right, I’m listening.”

“You wish me to ask you, then?” I said, keeping my face straight.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s up to you. I wasn’t doing anything important. And I’m not in a hurry. So, take as much time as you want.”

Explaining the joke to Daymar seemed like a poor use of my time, so I said, “It goes back to a remark you made some years ago. We were sitting around Castle Black, and you mentioned a Hawk rite of passage you’d undergone.”

“I don’t remember that,” he said. “I mean, I remember the rite, but I don’t remember talking about it.”

“We were all a little drunk.”

He nodded, waiting, his big eyes fixed on me. He has a way of looking at you that simultaneously indicates total concentration, and a distant abstraction. I’m not sure how he does it. But then, I’m not sure how he does most of what he does.

“You said something about a time you’d hidden from the Orb. Could you expand on that?”

I hadn’t thought about predicting what he’d say, but if I had, I would have been right. “Why would you want to know about that?” he said.

“Just curious,” I told him.

I don’t believe there is anyone else in the world who would have accepted that as a reasonable answer under the circumstances, but Daymar just nodded and said, “All right. What exactly do you want to know?”

“How did you do it?”

He tilted his head as if I’d asked him the sum of two and two.

“The link to the Orb comes in on a particular set of psychic channels. You just route those around you for as long as you need to hide.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t realized it was that simple.”

He nodded. “That’s all it is.”

“Well, good then.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Yes. How do you reroute a psychic channel?”

He blinked a couple of times, tilted his head again, and frowned. “Vlad,” he said, “are you jesting?”

“Remember,” I said, “I’m an Easterner.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Sorry. What is this?”

“Klava,” I said. “You’ve had it before.”

“Have I? Oh. Did I like it?”

“I think so.”

He nodded and drank some more.

“So,” I said. “Rerouting the channels will make you invisible to the Orb. Is that something I could do?”

“Well, first you have to identify the right channels. Then it’s just a matter of—hmm.” He looked at me and his brow furrowed. I’m pretty sure he was trying to get inside my head to test my psychic abilities, or power, or something. After a moment of being unable to do so, he looked puzzled and said, “Phoenix Stone?”

I nodded.

“I can’t get past it to tell. Could you remove it?”

“Uh, that would be a bad idea. There are people looking for me.”

“Looking for you? I don’t—”

“To kill me. Were I to remove the Phoenix Stone, they’d find me, and then they’d kill me, and I would be sad.”

“Oh.” He considered. “Why do they want to kill you?”

“We’ve discussed this before, Daymar. It’s the Jhereg. I offended them.”

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. Can you apologize?”

“Sure. The trick is getting them to accept the apology.”

“Oh. They’re not very forgiving, are they. I remember that.”

“Right. But I’m beginning to think there may be a way to.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe.”

“How?”

“That’s why I’m asking about hiding from the Orb.”

He did the head-tilt again. “Hiding from the Orb will help convince the Jhereg to accept the apology?”

“Not hiding from the Orb, exactly. But the Orb is how most Drag—humans communicate psychically. I know, you don’t. But most of them do. That means that if it’s possible to hide from the Orb, then it might also be possible to tap into those channels of the Orb.”

“Tap in?”

“Identify the channels psychically, manipulate them with sorcery to direct them to, say, me.”

“But then you’d—oh!” His eyes widened. Then he frowned. “Wouldn’t that be illegal?”

“I imagine it would. So, if you’d be so kind, explain.”

He gave a sort of shrug. “All right. It’s pretty simple; after you’ve identified the channels, you just externalize your thought-stream so you can shape it, and—”

“Wait. Slow down.”

“Vlad, how much do you know about the basics of psychic manipulation?”

“Not that much.”

“How about how sorcery works?”

“Not that much either. I just use it.”

“All right. Do you understand the Sea of Amorphia?”

“I know what it is. I mean, I know it’s amorphia.”

“And you know what amorphia is?”

“Ah, sort of.”

“It is simultaneously matter and energy, and—”

“Wait. What does that mean?”

“It means—” He stopped, frowned, and it was like I could see him back up to take another run at it. He said, “Amorphia is chaos: material randomness.”

“Um—”

“The Orb is a device for imposing dimensionality on its formlessness, thus permitting sorcerous access to amorphia, through the Orb.”

“Daymar, does ‘imposing dimensionality’ actually mean anything?”

“I think so.”

“All right. Please explain how this relates to hiding from the Orb. Or, more specifically, to identifying the channels through which someone is reaching the Orb.”

He did, and we’d each had another cup of klava by the time I realized that I was never going to be able to manipulate the channels myself—whether I had the psychic power I didn’t know, but I most certainly didn’t have the skill. I also had a deeper understanding of the relationship between physics and sorcery, and between sorcery and amorphia. And the beginnings of a headache.

But I also understood manipulating the channels well enough to know my plan might work. I didn’t need to be able to do it, you see. Well, I sort of did, but only once, so I was perfectly willing to cheat on that part. The point is, it had to be possible to do it. If it were possible, I could make it happen. Because I know people. Like Daymar.

When he’d finished the explanation, I said, “Thanks, Daymar. I appreciate you taking the time. Now let me tell you what I’m going to try, and you tell me if it’ll work.”

“All right.”

He listened, and his eyes widened. “Why didn’t I ever think of that?” were his first words.

I bit back the obvious reply and said, “Because you aren’t both a witch and a sorcerer. There aren’t many of us who are. Morrolan might have thought of it, but it would never cross his mind to do that. Will it work?”

“I could do it.”

“Yes, but can I? Using the equipment I talked about?”

“I can’t think of why not,” he said.

I nodded. “Good then. And thank you once more.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think a great deal. But not just now.”