“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Domm sat down again and waited, but kept his eyes fixed on me. I’ll bet he’s pretty good at telling when people are lying. But then, I’m pretty good at lying.
I said, “There was this man.” He asked me if I wanted to make some money—fifty imperials, he said, to go to a room in the city hall, say all these things, then walk around to a couple of places and say some more things. He told me what to say.”
“Who is he?” snapped Timmer.
“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Here—right here.”
Domm said, “How did he know to talk to you?” He was good, this guy.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, come on. You can do better than that. Do you expect us to believe he just walked in here and picked the first guy he saw to make this offer to?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
Domm said, “What House was he?”
“Orca,” I said. They looked at each other, which gave me the impression I’d scored a hit, although it was a pretty obvious thing to say.
Timmer said, “What did he look like?”
I started to make something up, then decided that Kaldor wasn’t all that observant, and they could work for what they got. “I don’t know, he was just, you know, just someone.”
“How old do you think he is?”
“I don’t know. Not too old. Twelve hundred or so.”
“Tall? Short?”
“I don’t know.”
“Taller than you?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone’s taller than me.”
Domm stood up. “Taller than me?”
“Uh, I think so.”
He sat down again. “Heavy-set?”
“No, no. Skinny.”
“Long hair? Short hair? Straight? Curly?”
And so on. Eventually they got a pretty good description of the nonexistent Orca, and I told them I hadn’t realized I was so observant.
“All right,” said Domm, nodding slowly after I’d finished. Then he paused, as if thinking things over, then he said, “Now let’s have the rest of it.”
“Huh?” I said, pretending to be startled.
“Who are you, and why did he come to you?”
Okay, this was the tricky part. As far as they were concerned, they’d gotten me beat, and it was just a matter of squeezing a little to get everything out of me. So I had to keep letting them think that, while still trying to pull my own game. This was, of course, made more difficult by the fact that I didn’t know what my own game was—I was still trying to find out as much as I could about what was going on.
I gave a sigh, let my lips droop, and covered my face with my hands. “None of that,” snapped Domm. “You know who we are, and you know what we can do to you. You have one chance to make this easy on yourself, and that’s by telling us everything, right now.”
I nodded into my hands. “Okay,” I said to the table.
“Start with your name.”
I looked up and, trying to make my voice small, I said, “What’s going to happen to me?”
“If you tell us the truth, nothing. We may take you in for more questioning, and we’ll need to know where we can reach you, but that’ll be all—if you tell us the truth and the whole truth.”
I gave Timmer a suspicious look.
“She won’t do anything,” said Domm.
“I want to hear her say it.”
She smiled just a bit and said, “I stand by what the lieutenant said. If you tell us the truth.”
Lying bastards, both of them. I gave them a suspicious look. “What about your commander? Will he go for it?”
Domm started to look impatient, but Timmer said, “If we give him the answers, he won’t care how we got them.”
“Is that the one I first talked to? What was his name, Loftis?”
“Yeah. He’ll go for it.”
I nodded, as if I was satisfied. I could feel them relax. “I should never have done this,” I said in the tones of a man about to spill his guts. “I’m just a thief, you know? I mean, I’ve never hurt anyone. I know a couple of Jhereg who buy what I steal, but—wait a minute. You don’t have to know the names of the Jhereg, do you?”
“I doubt it,” said Domm.
“They’ll kill me.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary,” said Timmer comfortingly. “And we can protect you, anyway,” she lied.
“All right,” I said. “Anyway, it was stupid. I should have known better. But fifty imperials!”
“Tempting,” said Domm.
“That’s the truth,” I said. “Anyway, my real name is Vaan. I was named after my uncle, who built—But you don’t want to hear about that. Right?” I stopped and shook my head sadly. “I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” said Timmer.
“But you can get out of it,” said Domm.
“Do you do this a lot? I mean, track people down and question them?”
They shrugged.
“That must be fun.”
Domm permitted himself a half-smile. “You were saying?”
“Uh, right.” I remembered I had a glass with some wine still in it, so I drank some and wiped my face with the back of my hand. “You got onto me from the locals, didn’t you? I mean, you’re from Adrilankha—anyone can hear it from your voice—but you checked on me with the locals and they told you about me.”
They grunted, which could mean anything, except that Timmer let slip a look that said they’d rather die than have anything to do with the locals. That was important, although it wasn’t the big thing I wanted to find out. But I had them going now. They’d broken me, and they knew that I would tell them everything I knew about everything if they handled me right, and handling me right meant letting me talk, only nudging me if I got too far off course. So now I had to stay almost on course, and let them drift with me just for a bit.
I said, “The local Guards had me in once or twice, you know. They let me go because they could never be sure, but they know about me. They beat me once, too—they thought I knew something about some big job or another, but I didn’t know anything about it. I never know anything about big jobs. Big jobs scare me. This one scared me, and I guess I was right to be scared.” I drank some more wine and risked a look at them. They were relaxed now, and not paying all that strict attention—in other words, set up.
I shook my head. “I should have listened to my instincts, you know? I was telling some friends of mine just the other day that I had a bad feeling—”
All of a sudden Domm was no longer relaxed. “What friends?” he snapped. “What did you tell them?” Then he caught himself and looked at Timmer, who was looking at him and frowning. And that made the fourth “Ah ha” of the day, which I decided would have to be enough, especially because one of the things I learned from this one was that they—or at least Domm—had no intention of leaving me alive.
I reached back, grabbed my sword, and nailed Domm in the side of the head with the flat, trying to knock him both out and into Timmer, but I couldn’t get quite enough power for either to work with my thin little blade. Timmer was fast. Really fast. She was up, weapon out, and coming at me before I’d stood up, and I had to squeeze into the corner and parry with both hands or she’d have spitted me; as it was she did violence to my arm, which I resented. But before she could withdraw her steel I cut at her forearm, then sliced up at her head, and—because of one move or the other—her blade fell to the floor. She bent over to pick up her weapon while I reached down and got my parcel of clothes from next to my chair. Among other things, it had my boots in it.
Domm was shaking his head—I’d at least slowed him down. Timmer came at me again, but I knocked her sword aside with my parcel, then hit her with the parcel, and I came up over the table and on the way by I thumped Domm’s head with the pommel of my rapier. As I came over the table it tipped and I was able to put it between me and Timmer for a second, which then I used to turn and dash out the back door. I couldn’t go as fast as I’d have liked, because of those Verra-be-damned boots, but I made it before they caught up with me.