I SAT FOR A long time after Vlad had finished speaking, digesting his words slowly and carefully, the way one might digest a seventeen-course Lyorn High Feast on Kieron’s Eve—a day I’ve never celebrated for personal reasons, though I’ve had the feast. I kept looking back and forth between Loiosh and Savn, who had perhaps gone a long way toward healing each other, although Loiosh showed no signs of injury save that he wasn’t moving much, and Savn showed no signs of healing save that he’d moved a little bit.
“Well?” said Vlad when he’d judged I’d been silent long enough.
“Well what?”
“Have you put it together?”
“Oh. Sorry, I was thinking about”—I gestured toward Savn—“other things.”
He nodded. “Do you want to try, or should I explain it?”
“Some of it, at least, is pretty obvious.”
“You mean, the land deal?”
“Yes. It was just a subtheme to the concerto: a few of them need to come up with a lot of cash in a hurry, so they buy out Fyres’s companies cheap, since they’re going under, anyway, then threaten people like our good Hwdf’rjaanci with eviction to make them worried, then vanish so they don’t know what’s happening so they’ll panic, and then, in a day or two, our heroes will come back with offers to sell them the land at outrageous prices, in cash.”
He nodded. “With nice offers of loans at Jhereg-style interest rates to go with them.”
“So our hostess isn’t really in danger of losing her cottage, and, if she’s careful, she can probably avoid being overcharged too much. In fact, if we can come up with some cash for her, she can even avoid the interest rates.”
“I think we can do that,” said Vlad.
“Between us,” I said, “I have no doubt that we can.”
“What about the rest of it?” he said. “Can you put it together?”
“Maybe. Do you know it all?”
“Almost,” he said. “There’s still a piece or two missing, but I have some theories; and there’s also a lot of background stuff that you can probably explain.”
“What’s missing?”
“Loftis.”
“You mean, why did Reega have him killed?”
“Yes. If it was Reega.”
“You think Vonnith was lying?”
“Not lying. But we don’t know yet if it was Reega’s choice, or if she just arranged it.”
“Why would she arrange it?”
“Because she was in a position to. She had a lot to gain, and she was in touch with Loftis.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“Because of the way she reacted when I told her the Empire was covering up something.”
“Oh, right. I’d forgotten. Yeah, she might have just arranged it. But, if so, who did she arrange it for? And why?”
“Good questions. That’s what I’m still missing.” He shook his head. “I wish I knew what ‘he didn’t break the stick’ means.”
“I think I know,” I said.
“Huh?”
“It goes back to the Fifth and Sixth Cycles, and even into the Seventh, before flashstones.”
“Yes?”
“Some elite corps were given sorcery. Nothing fancy, just a couple of location spells, and usually one or two offensive weapons to be used over a distance. They weren’t all that effective, by the way.”
“Whoever was the brigade’s sorcerer would bind the spells into a stick so that any idiot could release the spell. They used wood because binding them into stone took longer and was more difficult, although also more reliable.” I shrugged. “You point the stick at someone, and you release the spell, which doesn’t take a lot of skill, and you get a nasty scrape on your palm, and whoever you pointed the stick at has a much nastier burn. You can kill with it, and at a pretty good distance, if your hand is steady and your eye is good and, mostly, if the spell was put on right in the first place. Which it usually wasn’t,” I added, “according to the histories.”
“But what does—”
“Right. The thing is, the sticks were smoothed a bit to take the spell, but otherwise they were just sticks. Once you got into battle, you might be looking around and see one on the ground, but you’d have no way of knowing if it was discharged or not—that is, unless you were fairly skilled, the only way to find out if it had been used already was to discharge it. You can imagine that it might be embarrassing to pick one up on the field and assume it had a charge when it didn’t, or even the reverse.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“So the custom was to break it in half as soon as you’d discharged it.”
“And you think that’s what he was talking about?”
“‘Breaking the stick’ became a handy way of referring to leaving a signal, especially a warning.”
“How long since it’s been used?”
“A long time.”
“Then—”
“He was a military historian, Vlad. Remember how he kept making references to obscure—”
“Got it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it meant something else, but . . .”
“Well, that’s all very interesting.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and I could practically hear the tides of his thoughts break against the shore of facts as he put things together in new ways; I waited and wondered. “Hmmm. Yes, Kiera, it’s all very interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think I have the rest of it. And then some.”
“And then some?”
“Yeah, I got more than I wanted. But never mind that, it doesn’t matter. Can you put it together?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Well, let’s see what we have. We have Fyres murdered, and someone desperate to hide that fact. We have companies he was into falling like Teckla at the Wall of Baritt’s Tomb. We have someone, or someones, in the Empire desperate to hide the fact that Fyres was murdered. Am I doing all right so far?”
“Yep. Keep going.”
“Okay. We have Jhereg involvement with Fyres, and Imperial involvement with the banks, and—wait a minute.”
“Yes?”
“Fyres owed the Jhereg. Fyres owed the banks. The banks and the Jhereg were depending on Fyres. The Empire was protecting the banks, and the banks were supporting the Empire. Have I got it?”
“Right. Conclusion?”
“The Empire is working with the Jhereg.”
“Exactly,” said Vlad. “Supporting the Jhereg, borrowing from the Jhereg, and, probably, using the Jhereg.”
“Just as you were saying.”
“Yeah, I guess it all seemed to be heading that way. But push it a little further, Kiera: what would the empire do if word of the Jhereg’s influence in the Empire was about to emerge into the public?”
I shrugged. “Everything it could to hide that fact.”
“Everything?”
I nodded. “Yes. Or, if it’s what you want, everything including covering up the Fyres murder, and even—yes, and even murdering their own investigator if they thought he was no longer reliable.”
“Yep. That’s what ‘he didn’t break the stick’ meant. It bothered me that someone like Loftis would be that careless. It either meant we were wrong about him or there was something we didn’t know, and now we’ve figured it out.”
“Yes,” I said. “He was set up by his own side.”
Vlad nodded. “He wasn’t given the warning he was supposed to get if there was any danger. They’d probably picked that spot out, and there was supposed to be some indication either that it was all right or that it wasn’t. And so he thought he was safe, and that’s why they could take him out so easily.”
“Right. Domm?”
“His name popped into my head,” said Vlad.
I nodded. “Domm would be a safe guess. Reega set it up, and Domm made sure Loftis wouldn’t be ready to defend himself, and they used you—”
I stopped, and looked at Vlad. He said, “What?” Then, “Oh.”
“They were too ready, and you were too convenient.”
“I didn’t give the game away,” said Vlad. “I didn’t slip up. They already knew about me when I walked in, which means they already knew about you.”
I nodded. “And that explains something else: namely, why it’s been so easy to fool these people. We haven’t fooled anyone, except maybe Vonnith. They’ve been playing with us, and letting us think we were playing with them.”
“Not Vonnith, either,” said Vlad. “She was onto me from the moment I first showed up.”
“Stony?”
“Yes. I figured that it was just bad timing, him being there right then. But she must have gotten hold of him when I got there, and then all she had to do was delay me until he was ready to move.”
I nodded.
He said, “Well, aren’t we a couple of idiots?”
I nodded again. “Stony,” I said. “That son of a bitch.”
“What now, then?”
“Now, Vlad? What is there to do? We’ve solved Hwdf’rjaanci’s problem, which was all we intended, and we’ve figured out what’s going on, and we’ve also figured out that they had our number from the beginning. We’re done.”
He stared at me. “You mean, let them get away with it?”
I grinned. “I will if you will.”
“For a minute there,” he said, “you had me worried.” Then he frowned. “When do you think they caught onto us?”
“Early,” I said. “Remember Stony asking if I’d seen you?”
“Sure. I just figured it was a sign of how bad they want me, and they know we know each other.”
“That’s what I thought, too. And, right then, that’s probably all it was. But then they put it together. Fyres’s place is broken into, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. You didn’t tell me why you wanted me to do that. If you had, maybe I’d have been messier, or done something atypical, but, as it was, it was a usual Kiera job, and anyone who knows my work, which certainly includes Stony, would—” I held up my hand as he started to speak. “No, I’m not blaming you: you had no reason to think I’d be involved after doing what you wanted; neither did I, really, I just got interested. But think about it. What’s the next thing that happens after I break into Fyres’s old place and steal his private papers?”
“You start asking Stony questions about him.”
“Right.”
“And we didn’t know that Stony was involved enough to be hearing everything that happened regarding Fyres, the banks, the investigations, and everything else.”
“That’s it,” I said. “Stony knows, right then and there, that I’m looking into Fyres’s death, though he probably doesn’t know why. But he knows Kiera the Thief is sniffing around the death of this rich guy who’s made so much trouble.”
“And then what does he do?”
I said, “He starts asking himself where the next logical place to look is, if someone is interested in Fyres’s death. And it is?”
“The Imperial investigation.”
“Exactly. So there he is, alerting Loftis and his merry band that Kiera the Thief might appear out of nowhere, or maybe someone working for Kiera. And who shows up there, right on schedule, but to everyone’s amazement?”
Vlad nodded. “I do,” he said, with more than a touch of bitterness in his voice. “In my great disguise that fooled them so completely.”
“Yes. Loftis is looking for people to show up asking questions, and he’s looking carefully for anyone in disguise, and there you are. We had no way of knowing that Loftis and Stony were in touch—and maybe they weren’t, directly. But, one way or another, Stony hears that Loftis had a visit from an Easterner trying to disguise himself as a Chreotha. ‘Tell me about this Easterner,’ he probably says. ‘And what kind of questions did he ask?’”
Vlad nodded. “Yes. And, all of a sudden, you and I are tied together, looking into Fyres’s death.”
“Right. Now the Jhereg is hot for you. Somehow or other, Reega learns of it.”
“Not somehow or other,” said Vlad. “Because they went to her, the same way they went to Vonnith, and probably Endra as well. After all, they followed me. I let them. I thought I was being clever. Vonnith is so far into the Jhereg that she had no choice, and they probably offered her a good piece of change to help them. But Reega had her own ideas.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That’s probably how it worked. If we’d gone back to Reega, rather than to Vonnith, the same thing would have happened, most likely. But first, Reega either decided or, more likely, was told to get rid of Loftis.”
“Yes. And Loftis was told to try to pump me. So Loftis tries to pump me, and he brings me to this place where the arrest is planned, and then, bang, no more Loftis. All without the Jhereg’s knowledge, because the Jhereg wouldn’t have let me out of there alive. Do I have it?”
“That’s how I read it,” I said.
“Kiera, we have been thoroughly taken.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t like it any more than I do, do you?”
“Rather less, in fact, I would imagine.”
“So, what are we going to do about it?”
“At the moment,” I said, “I cannot say. But, no doubt, something will occur. Let us consider the matter.”
“Right,” said Vlad, who was looking at me a little funny.
I said, “What about the information from Vonnith? Can we trust it, if she knew you weren’t who you claimed to be?”
“I think so,” said Vlad. “She knew her job; she was supposed to keep me there long enough for them to kill me. Why bother to think up lies when the guy who’s hearing the truth is about to become deceased?”
“Good point.”
“So, what now?”
I said, “Lieutenant Domm?”
“Eh?” said Vlad. And, “Oh. You think he’s the one who wanted Loftis out of the way? There was no love lost between them, but they were in the same corps.”
“Were they?” I said.
“Eh?”
“Think back to that conversation you overheard—”
“You don’t mean that was staged, do you? I don’t believe—”
“Neither do I. No, at that point they didn’t know who you were, and they weren’t looking for witchcraft. I mean after that.”
“My talk with Domm at the Riversend?”
“Yes. They probably hadn’t had time to figure out who you were yet, so you might have even had them fooled. But maybe not. Think over that conversation. You made Domm slip and let what’s-her-name, Timmer, know that something wasn’t right.”
“What about it?”
“I think that was legit. But what evidence is there that Domm was in the same corps as Loftis?”
“Then who—”
“Who would normally conduct such an investigation?”
“Uh . . . I don’t remember. That group that reports to Indus?”
“Right. The Surveillance group. And there almost had to be someone from that group involved, just because it would look funny if there weren’t.”
“But now we’re implicating Indus.”
“So? As far as I can tell, Vlad, we’re implicating everyone in the Empire with the possible exception of Her Majesty and Lord Khaavren.”
“I—”
“I don’t think you realize what we’re dealing with here, Vlad.”
“You mean it’s that big?”
“No, I mean it’s that—I don’t know the word—pervasive. We’ve been looking for corrupt officials, and checking them off our list when we decided they weren’t corruptible. But that isn’t the point at all.”
“Go on,” he said, frowning.
“Corruption doesn’t enter into it. Oh, maybe Shortisle, or someone on his staff, is lining his pocket. But that’s trivial. What’s happening here is everyone involved in the mechanism of the Empire is working together to do his job just the way he’s supposed to.”
“Come again?”
“The Empire is nothing more than a great big, overgrown, understaffed, and horribly inefficient system for keeping things working.”
“Thank you,” he said, “for the lesson in government. But—”
“Bear with me, please.”
He sighed. “All right.”
“By things,” I said, “I mean, mostly, trade.”
“I thought putting down rebellions was the big thing.”
“Sure,” I said. “Because it’s hard to trade if there’s a rebellion in progress.” He smiled, and I shook my head. “No, I’m really not kidding. Whether a certain piece of ground is ruled by Baron Wasteland or Count Backward doesn’t make a difference to much of anyone, except maybe our hypothetical aristocrats. But if the trees from that piece of ground don’t reach the shipwrights here in Northport, then, eventually, we’re going to run out of that particular lime they have in Elde, which we use as an agent mixed with our lime to make mortar to keep our buildings from falling down.”
“Reminds me of the couple who didn’t know the difference between—”
“Hush. I’m being grandiloquent.”
“Sorry.”
“And we’d also, by the way, run out of that lovely Phoenix Stone from Greenaere that I think you know something about. That’s one of the simplest examples. Do you want to hear about how a dearth of wheat from the Northwest shuts down all the coal mines in the Kanefthali Mountains? I didn’t think so.
“The point,” I continued, “is trade. If it weren’t for the Empire, which controls it, everyone would make up his own rules, and change them as occasion warrants, and create tariffs that would send prices through the overcast, and everyone would suffer. If you need proof, look to your homeland, and consider how they live, and think about why.”
“Life span has something to do with that,” he said. “As does the tendency of the Empire to invade whenever it doesn’t have anything better to do.”
“Trade has more to do with it.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I suppose. But how does all of this relate to corruption among the great and wonderful leaders of our great and wonderful—”
“That’s what I’m saying, Vlad. It isn’t corruption. It’s worse—it’s incompetence. And, worse than that, it’s inevitable incompetence.”
“I’m listening, Kiera.”
“Why does a banker go into business?”
“I thought we were talking about the Empire?”
“Trust me.”
“All right. A banker goes into business because he’s an Orca and he doesn’t like the sea.”
“Stop being difficult.”
“What do you want?”
“Obvious answers to stupid questions. Why does a banker go into business?”
“To make money.”
“How does he make money.”
“He steals it.”
“Vlad.”
“All right. The same way a Jhereg moneylender does, only he doesn’t make as much because his interest rate is lower and he has to pay taxes—though he does save some in bribes.”
“Spell it out for me, Vlad. How does a banker make money?”
He sighed. “He makes loans to people and charges them for it, so they pay him more than he loaned them. In the Jhereg, interest is calculated so that—”
“Right. Okay. Here’s another easy one: what determines how much profit a banker makes?”
“How much money he loans, and at what interest rate. What do I win?”
“So what keeps him from running up the interest rates?”
“All the other bankers.”
“And what keeps them from getting together and agreeing to raise the rates?”
“Competition from the Jhereg.”
“Wrong.”
“Really? Damn. And I was doing so well. Why is that wrong?”
“I’ll put it another way: what keeps them from getting together, including the Jhereg, and fixing interest rates that way?”
“Uh . . . hmm. The Empire?”
“Congratulations. The Empire sets limits on the rates, because the Empire has to take loans out, too, and if the Empire got rates that were too much better than everyone else’s, the Great Houses would object, and the Empire has to always play the Houses off against each other, because, really, the Empire is just the sum of the Great Houses, and if they all combined against the Empire . . .”
“Got it. No more Empire.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, so the Empire fixes the maximum loan rate.”
“Rates. There are several, having to do with, well, all sorts of complicated things. That’s Shortisle’s job.”
“Got it. Okay, go on. So, in effect, the maximum profit a banker can get is set by law.”
“Nope.”
“Uh . . . okay, why not?”
“Because there’s another way to maximize profits.”
“Oh, right. Loan more money. But you can’t make loans if people don’t need the money.”
“Sure you can. You can create the need.”
“You mean the land swindle?”
“No. That’s trivial. Oh, I’m sure that’s why it’s being done, but it isn’t happening on anywhere near the scale that would pull the Empire into it.”
“All right. Go on, then. How?”
“Undercut the Jhereg.”
He shrugged. “They always do that. But the Jhereg moneylenders stay in business, anyway.”
“Because we aren’t as fussy about making sure the customer can pay us back, because we have our own ways of making sure we get paid back.”
It was interesting that Vlad still thought of the Organization as “we,” but I didn’t choose to comment on that. I said, “Exactly. And so . . . ?”
He frowned. “You mean they start making it easier to get loans?”
“Precisely.”
“But then, what if the loans aren’t paid back?”
“Vlad, I’m not talking about small stuff, like someone wanting to buy a house. I’m talking about big finance, like someone wanting to start a major shipping firm.”
He smiled. “Just to pick an example by random? Well, all right. So then what happens?” He answered his own question. “Then the banks go under. That’s stupid business.”
“Maybe. But what if you don’t have any choice?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you had a pile of cash—”
He smiled. I’d forgotten how much money he had.
“Let me rephrase. If you had a pile of cash that you wanted to put into a bank—”
“Ah!”
“Which bank would you choose?”
“I wouldn’t. I’d give it to an Organization moneylender.”
“Work with me, Vlad.”
“All right. I don’t know. I guess the one that had the best rates.”
“What if they were all the same?”
“Then the one that seemed the most reliable.”
“Right. What makes a bank reliable? Or, more precisely, what would make you think a bank was reliable?”
“I don’t know. How long it’s been around, I suppose, and its reputation, how much money it has.”
“How do you know how much money it has?”
“The Empire publishes lists of that sort of thing, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Another of Shortisle’s jobs.”
“You mean he’s been lying?”
“Not exactly. Don’t get ahead of me. What determines how much money the bank has, or, rather, how much money the Empire reports the bank as having? I mean, do you think they go in and count it?”
“Well, sort of. Don’t they do audits?”
“Yes. And do you know how the audits work?”
“Not exactly.”
“They look at how much gold they claim to have on hand and compare it with what they find in the vaults, and then—here’s the fun part—they look at their paperwork and add the amount they have, as we’d put it, on the street. And the more money they have on the street, the richer they are. Or, rather, the richer they look.”
He frowned. “So, you mean, if they start making risky loans, it looks like they’re doing really well, when in fact they may be—”
“Tottering on the edge of ruin. Yes.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Savn was snoring in a corner, Buddy curled up on one side of him, Rocza on the other, with Loiosh next to her. There were occasional sounds from the predators outside, but nothing else. I gave Vlad some time to think over what I’d told him.
Eventually he said, “The Empire—”
“Yes, Vlad. Exactly. The Empire.”
“Aren’t they supposed to check on things like that?”
“They do their best, sure. But how many banks are there making how many loans? Do you really think Shortisle has the means to inspect every loan from every bank to make sure it isn’t too risky? And, even if it is, it has to be pretty extreme before the Empire has the right to step in.”
“But—”
“Yes, but. But if several banks fail all at once, then what happens to trade?”
“It falls apart. And they can’t allow that.”
“So what do they do?”
“You tell me,” said Vlad.
“All right. First of all, they curse themselves soundly for having allowed things to get into that sort of mess in the first place.”
“Good move. Then what?”
“Then they try to cover for the banks as much as they can.”
“Ah ha.”
“Right. If word get out that Fyres was murdered, then they’ll have to find out why, and then—”
“Right,” said Vlad. “Then word will get out that lots of big banks, starting with the Verra-be-damned bank of the Verra-be-damned Empire, are very rich on paper and, in fact, are on the edge of taking that big tumble into oblivion. And if that happens—”
“Panic, bank runs, and—”
“Trade goes overboard in a big way.”
I nodded. “That’s what I didn’t see right away. This isn’t a few slime-bags in the Empire lining their pockets, this is the Empire doing what it’s supposed to do—protecting trade.”
He shook his head. “And all of this starting off just because somebody knocked a big-time scam artist in the head.”
“A big-time, extremely wealthy scam artist.”
“Yes. Only one thing.”
“Yes, Vlad?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Well, this sort of mess isn’t good for anyone, right?”
“Right.”
“So if all this was set off by Fyres’s death, why was he killed?”
I stared off into space for a moment, then I said, “You know, Vlad, that is a very, very good question.”
“Yeah, I thought so. So what’s the answer?”
“I don’t know.”
“And here’s another question: with Stony dead, is the Jhereg still onto me? I mean, are they still breathing down my neck, or do I have a little time to find the answer to the first question?”
I nodded. “That one I think I can find the answer to.”
“I’d appreciate it. What about the other one?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll wait here,” he said.