His smile disappeared. “There’s that.”
“Well then?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. That was all right, I can be a very patient woman.
“You know,” I said, “there aren’t all that many Easterners who walk around with a pair of jhereg on their shoulders; are you quite certain you aren’t too conspicuous?”
“Yeah. No professional would try anything in a place like this, and any amateur who wants to is welcome to take a shot. And by the time word gets around so someone who knows his business can set up something, I’ll be gone.”
“But they’ll know where you are.”
“I don’t plan on being here for more than a few days.”
I nodded.
He said hesitantly, “Any news from home?”
“None I can tell you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re asking about Cawti.”
“Well—”
“I’ve promised not to say anything except that she’s fine.”
“Oh.” I watched his mind work, but he didn’t say anything else. I very badly wanted to tell him what was going on, but a promise is a promise, even to a thief. Especially to a thief.
I said, “How have you been getting by?”
“It’s been harder since I acquired the boy, but I’ve managed.”
“How?”
“I mostly stay away from towns, and you know the forests are filled with bandits of one sort or another.”
“You’ve become one?”
“No, I rob them.”
I laughed. “That sounds like you.”
“It’s a living.”
“That sounds like you, too.”
He shifted his weight as if his feet were causing him pain; it made me think about the amount of walking he must have been doing in these past three years and more. I said, “Do you want to sit down?”
“You don’t miss much,” he said. “No, I’m fine. Ever heard of a man named Fyres?”
“Yes. He died a couple of weeks ago.”
“Other than that, what do you know about him?”
“He had a great deal of money.”
“Yes. What else?”
“He was, what, a baron? House of the, uh, Chreotha?”
“Orca.”
“All right. Then that tells you what I know about him.”
Vlad didn’t answer, which meant that I was supposed to ask him a question. I thought over a number of things I’d have liked to know, then settled on, “How did he die?”
“They’ve found no evidence of murder.”
“That’s not—Wait. You?”
He shook his head. “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”
“All right,” I said. Vlad has always had the ability to make me believe him, even though I know what a liar he is. “Then what do you think happened?”
His eyes were in constant motion, and the jhereg, too, never stopped looking around. “I don’t know,” he said, “and I have to find out.”
“Why?”
For just an instant he looked embarrassed, and “Oh ho!” passed through my head, but I sent it on its way—Vlad could be embarrassed by the oddest things.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let me tell you what I’d like you to do.”
“I’m listening.”
One thing I like about Vlad is that he understands details. He not only gave me every detail of every alarm I was likely to encounter but also told me how he found out, so I could do my own checking. He told me where the stuff was likely to be and why he thought so, and the other places it might be located if he was wrong. He gave me the schedules of the patrols in the area and explained exactly what he hadn’t been able to discover. It took about an hour, at the end of which time I knew the job would be well within my capabilities—not that there are many jobs that aren’t, if they involve stealing.
I said, “There will be a price.”
“Of course,” he said, trying to hide that I’d hurt his feelings.
“You have to tell me why you want it.”
He bit his lip and looked at me carefully; I kept my face expressionless, because I didn’t want him learning too much. He nodded abruptly, and the deal was made.
It took me two days to check everything Vlad had told me—two days that I spent working out of a reasonably comfortable room in a hotel in the middle of Northport; on the third I went to work. The place I was to burgle was situated a couple of miles east of Northport, and the walk there was the most chancy part of the operation—if anyone saw me and saw through my disguise as easily as Vlad had, it would arouse curiosity, and that would lead to investigations and that would lead to this and that. I solved the problem by staying off the roads and sticking as much as I could to the thin-wooded areas to the side. I didn’t get lost, but it was several hours before I reached the bottom of a small hill, with Fyres’s mansion looming above me.
I spent a couple of hours walking a wide circuit around it, taking a long, slow look at the place. One of the things Vlad hadn’t given me was a set of blueprints, but with this newer work you can almost create the inside by seeing the outside; for some reason post-Interregnum architects object to having rooms without windows, which means the dimensions indicate the layout. You can also identify windowed corridors because (again, I don’t know why) the windows are invariably smaller than those in rooms. By the time I’d finished my walk, I pretty much knew what it looked like, and I’d found the most obvious places for an office.
I spent the last hours of daylight watching for any signs of activity. There were none, which was as it should be—Fyres’s family (a wife and three children) didn’t live there, his mistress had abandoned the place, the staff were, no doubt, ensconced within, and all of the remaining protection was sorcerous and automatic. I took out a few of the devices I use to identify such things and set to work.
Darkness came as it always does, with shadows becoming dusk—shadows that were a bit sharper here than in Adrilankha, I suppose because the westerly winds thin out the overcast, so the Furnace is more apparent. Everything is brighter in the west of the Empire, as it is in the far east; all of which makes the darkness seem even darker.
The protections weren’t bad, but not as thorough as I would have expected. The first was very general and nearly useless—all you had to do was pretend you belonged there and it would let you burn down the place without raising a fuss. The recognition spell was only marginally trickier, requiring me to cause it to bend around and past me; but there was no spell monitoring whether the recognition spell was being bent, so, really, they might as well not have bothered with it. There were the usual integrity detectors on the doors and windows, but these are easily defeated by transferring the one you want to pass to another door or window. These, in fact, did have monitor spells to watch for just this, but they’d been cast almost as an afterthought and without anything to let the security people know the monitor had been removed—I could take it down just by identifying the energy committed to that spell and absorbing it into a working of my own.
I considered the significance of how poorly the mansion was protected. It might mean that since the place was abandoned and its owner was dead, no one felt the need to use high-level protections. It might also mean that the Orca weren’t as sophisticated as the Jhereg. Or it might mean that there were some traps concealed that I hadn’t found yet. That possibility was worth an extra hour of checking, and I took it.
I went through enough gear to stock a small sorcery shop and found fertility spells that had probably been placed on the ground before the mansion was built, spells that kept the latrines from smelling, spells that kept the mansion from sinking into the ground, spells that kept the stonework from crumbling, and spells to make the row of rednut trees that flanked the road grow just so—but nothing else that had anything to do with security. I even used a blue stone I’d picked from the pocket of Vlad’s friend Aliera, but the only signs of elder sorcery were distant echoes from the explosion that had dissolved Dragaera City at the start of the Interregnum.