The Book of Taltos (7 page)

Business. Right.

I cleared my throat. I said, “You wanted to talk business. You want to buy a title in the Jhereg? Sure, I can set that up. Or maybe you want to buy into—”

“Enough,”
said Morrolan.

I’ll admit it: Push me far enough and anger overcomes self-preservation. I said, “Shove it, Dragonlord. I don’t know what ‘business’ you think you have with me, but you have interfered with my work, murdered my employee, tricked me, and threatened me. Now you want to talk business? Shit. Talk away.” I sat back, crossed my legs, and folded my arms.

They exchanged glances for a moment. Perhaps they were communicating psionically, perhaps only by expression. After a minute or so I sipped some more liqueur. The servant finished gathering the spilled money onto the tray. He started to offer it to Sethra again, but she glared at him. He gave some sort of grimace of resignation and set it down on a nearby table.

Sethra turned to me and said, “I don’t know what to say. We thought you’d be pleased that we had killed this man and saved you the trouble—”

“Saved me the trouble? Who says I was going to kill him?” Well, sure, I was, but I wasn’t going to admit to these two, was I? “And I wouldn’t have needed to find him if you two hadn’t—”

“Lord Taltos, please,” said Sethra. She seemed genuinely contrite, and I guess the shock of that realization stopped me as much as her words. She said, “I assure you that all we did was help him choose the time for his theft. Morrolan’s spell wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been planning to steal from you anyway.” She paused, glanced at Morrolan, and shrugged. “We knew you to be a Jhereg as well as an Easterner, and had been expecting you to respond as a Jhereg only. Most of those in your House would have been happy to discuss a business deal no matter how they were brought into it. It seems we don’t know Easterners. We have erred. We are sorry.”

I bit my lip and thought about it. I would have felt better if Morrolan had expressed an apology, but there’s something to be said for extracting one from the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain, isn’t there? All right, I’ll be honest. I still don’t know if she was making all that up as she went along or if she was telling the truth, but believing her salved my pride a little. It allowed me to continue talking to them, at any rate.

I said, “Would you mind explaining to me why you went through all this in the first place?”

Sethra said, “Very well, then. Tell me this: Can you think of any other way we could have gotten you here?”

“Paying me would have worked.”

“Would it have?”

I reflected. No, I suppose if they’d offered me enough to convince me to come, it would have just made me suspicious. I said, “If you’d wanted to see me, you could have come to me,” I smirked. “The door to my office—”

“It is impossible for me to leave Dzur Mountain at the moment.”

I gestured toward Morrolan. “And him?”

“I wanted to see you myself.” She smiled a little. “Which is just as well, since I might have had some trouble convincing him to walk into a Jhereg’s place of business.”

Morrolan snorted. I said, “All right, I’m convinced that you’re clever.” I
felt silent, but they seemed to be waiting for me to continue. What was there to say? I felt my jaw clenching with anger that hadn’t yet died down. But, as I said, my best chance of getting out of there alive was cooperation. If they wanted me for something, they at least weren’t going to kill me out of hand. I let out my breath and said, “Business, then. You have business in mind. Tell me about it.”

“Yes.” She sent Morrolan a glance that was impossible to read, then turned back to me. “There is a thing we’d like you to do.”

I waited.

She said, “This is going to take some explanation.”

D
URING MY ENTIRE TENTH
year it was almost impossible to keep me away from my grandfather’s. I felt my father’s growing dislike of this, and ignored it. Noish-pa was delighted at my interest in witchcraft. He taught me to draw things that I only saw in his mind, and gave me tours of his memories of his homeland. I still remember how it felt to see clear blue sky, with white puffy clouds and a sun so bright I couldn’t look directly at it, even through the eyes of his memory. And I remember the stars as vividly as if I were there. And the mountains, and the rivers.

Finally my father, in an effort to distract me, hired a sorcerer to teach me. He was a snide young Jhegaala whom I hated and who didn’t like me, but he taught me anyway and I learned anyway. I hate to think of what that cost my father. It was interesting, and I did learn something, but I resented it, so I didn’t work as hard as I could have. In fact, I think I was working not to like it. But, on the other hand, I enjoyed the closeness with my grandfather much more than I enjoyed making pretty flashing lights in the palm of my hand.

This process continued for quite some time—until my father died, in fact. My grandfather had started teaching me fencing, in the one-handed, side-stance Eastern rapier style. When my father learned of it, he hired a Dragaeran sword teacher to show me the full-forward cut and slash sword and dagger method, which turned out to be a fiasco since I hadn’t the strength to use even the practice sword of the Dragaerans.

The funny thing is, I suspect that if my father had ever actually told Noish-pa
to stop, he would have. But my father never did; he only glowered and sometimes complained. I think he was so convinced that everything Dragaeran was better than everything Eastern, he expected me to be convinced of it, too.

Poor fool.

S
ETHRA
L
AVODE STUDIED THE
floor, and the expression on her face was the one I wear when I’m trying to figure out a delicate way to say something. Then she nodded, almost imperceptibly, and looked up. “Do you know the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer?”

I said, “I think so.”

“There aren’t many who can achieve the skill in sorcery, necromancy, and other disciplines to combine them effectively. Most wizards are of the House of the Athyra or the House of the Dzur. Loraan is an Athyra.”

“What was the name?”

“Loraan.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“No. You wouldn’t have. He’s never done anything remarkable, really. He is a researcher of magic, as are most Athyra wizards. If it means anything to you, he discovered the means by which the last thoughts of the dying may be preserved temporarily in fluids. He was attempting to find more reliable means of communicating with the dead by introducing a means of . . .”

After a few minutes of getting lost in a description of strange sorcery that I’ll never need to know, I interrupted. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s just say he’s good at what he does. What do you want from me?”

She smiled a little. Her lips were very thin and pale. She said, “He has in his possession a certain staff or wand, containing a necromantic oddity—the soul of a being who is neither alive nor dead, unable to reach the Plane of Waiting Souls, unable to reach the Paths of the Dead, unable to—”

“Fine,” I said. “A staff with a soul in it. Go on.”

Morrolan shifted and I saw his jaw working. He was staring at me hard but I guess exercising restraint. It occurred to me for the first time that they wanted me pretty badly.

Sethra said, “We have spoken to him at great length, but he is determined
to keep this soul imprisoned. The soul is a wealth of information for him, and his work is all he cares about. He happened to acquire it shortly after the end of the Interregnum, and has no interest in giving it up. We have been trying to convince him to sell or trade it for several weeks now, ever since we discovered where it was. We have been looking for it for more than two hundred years.”

I began to get the picture, and I didn’t like it at all. But I said, “Okay, go on. How do I fit in?”

“We want you to break into his keep and steal the staff.”

I said, “I’m trying to find a polite way of saying ‘drop dead,’ and not having much luck.”

“Don’t bother being polite,” said Sethra with a smile that sent chills up and down my spine. “I died before the Interregnum. Will you take the job?”

I took hold of the knife I’d carried for so long and used so seldom. The one with the ebony hilt and embedded rubies, and the thin, dull blade of pure silver. It wasn’t as expensive as it looked, but then, it looked very expensive.

I held it near the point, holding it firmly between my thumb and forefinger, then I knelt down, so slowly I felt tremors in my legs. Just as slowly, I touched the point of the dagger to the ground. I stopped for a moment, studying the dirt. It was black and dry and fine, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. I touched it with my left hand. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was powdered and very cold.

Enough. I concentrated on the knife again, and very slowly drew the rune for the verb “to receive.” The rune, of course, was in the language of sorcery, which was meaningless at this time and in this place. But it gave me a spot to concentrate my attention on, and that was what I wanted. I drew a circle around the rune then, and set the knife aside. I knelt and studied the drawing, waiting for the moment to begin again.

I was very much aware of Loiosh, claws hard on my right shoulder, a pressure more than a weight. It was as if none of the events of the last few days had affected him, which I knew wasn’t the case; he was the wall of
calm, the pillar of ice, the ground that would hold me steady. If you think that isn’t important, you’re a bigger fool than I am.

Moments went by in contemplation, and I began the next step.

T
HERE WERE NO WINDOWS
in the room, yet we must have been near the outside, because I could hear distant cries of ravens, and the occasional roar of a hunting dzur. I wondered if there were dragons on the mountain, present company excepted, of course. Why have a room with a wall to the outside and not put a window in it? Who knows? I like windows, but maybe Sethra Lavode doesn’t. It is true that windows enable others to see in as well as allow you to see out.

A candle flickered and shadows danced.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s back up a little. If you want this staff so badly, why don’t you and the Lord Morrolan here just blast into his keep and take it?”

“We’d like to,” said Morrolan.

Sethra Lavode nodded. “One doesn’t just ‘blast into’ the keep of an Athyra wizard. Perhaps if I were able to leave—but never mind.”

I said, “Okay, fine. But look: I don’t know what you know about me or what you think you know about me, but I’m not a thief. I don’t know anything about breaking into places and stealing things. I don’t know what made you think I could do it in the first place—”

“We know a great deal about you,” said the Enchantress.

I licked my lips. “All right, then you know I’m not—”

“Close enough,” said Morrolan.

“The point is,” said Sethra Lavode before I could respond, “the particular nature of Loraan’s alarm system.”

“Ummmm, all right,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

“He has spells over the entire keep that keep track of every human being in the place, so any intruder, no matter how good, will be instantly detected. Neither Morrolan nor I have the skill to disable these alarms.”