“Good evening,” I said. I gestured toward the boy. “I see some improvement.”
“Some,” agreed Vlad.
Hwdf rjaanci nodded a greeting to me and asked if I wanted some tea, which I didn’t.
I was pleased, and even a bit surprised, to note that Vlad didn’t have any fresh wounds. He was drinking klava, and by the lack of sleep in his eyes I suspect he was on at least his second cup. Loiosh, on the other hand, was sound asleep next to Rocza, which was unusual for a jhereg in the middle of the day. “I have some information,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Vlad.
“Should I go first, or do you want to?”
“You might as well,” said Vlad.
I sat down next to him. Hwdf rjaanci got up and sat over by Savn—I had the impression she didn’t want to know about any of this. I decided I couldn’t really blame her.
“Did you do it?” he said.
“You mean enrage the bees? Yeah.”
“Tell me about it.”
“All right.” This time I just gave him the brief version of my activities, especially the break-in, because the long version would have required telling him things I’d rather he didn’t know, then I gave him all the details on the rest of it. I sort of brushed over the part about making myself a target, but I saw him press his lips together, so I quickly went on to discuss the conversation with Stony, and, before he could ask about that, I started in on the results of my inquiries the first couple of days.
I said, “I found a couple of them, Vlad. Three, really, but one had refused him a loan just because he didn’t like Fyres’s smell, so that didn’t help us any. But there were two of them who actually did the checking.”
“How many that didn’t?”
“A lot. He was very good at making people trust him.”
Vlad nodded. “Okay. Those who did check up on him—what did they find out?”
“That he was very good at making people trust him.”
Vlad’s smile came and went. “Yeah. What else?”
“Vlad, he didn’t have anything. He had a great deal on paper, but all of his enterprises, worth maybe sixty million imperials—”
Vlad looked shocked. “That’s right,” I said. “Sixty million imperials. Sixty million imperials’ worth of loans, that went for office space, marketing, buying up other companies that, in point of fact, he didn’t know how to run so they went into surrender of debts inside of ten or twenty years—all of this was based on a contract, and a contract never fulfilled, by the way, for five men-o’-war for the Imperial Navy.”
“House of the Orca, of course,” said Vlad.
“Sure, Imperial Navy.”
“I wonder,” said Vlad.
“Yes?”
“I wonder why legitimate banks were loaning him money at all. I mean, I can see the Jhereg, but—”
“Are you sure they were? We know about Vonnith, but do we know there were any others?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it.”
“Okay. I don’t know the answer, though. But it makes sense. It explains why the loans were at bank rates, not Jhereg rates.”
“They were?”
“Yes. All of them.”
“Interesting. Maybe the Jhereg loans went through the banks.” He spread his palms. “Or the other way around, for all we know.”
I nodded.
He said, “But all right. The Jhereg is in it deep, then?”
“Lots of us, Vlad. All the way up to the Council.”
“Did either of your friends try to spread the word about the guy?”
“One of them tried to let a few friends know, but no one would listen. The other, apparently, doesn’t have any friends, and figured he could eliminate a great deal of competition. He was right, by the way—some very heavy people will be going down over this.”
Hwdf rjaanci got up and went outside, I suppose because she could still hear us. Buddy looked at her, thumped his tail once, but decided he wanted to stay and listen.
Vlad considered my remark and said, “That ties Fyres into the Jhereg without any question, but ... how did he land that contract with the Imperial Navy, after having proved what he was twice before?”
“Ah,” I said. “Very good. That is the question, isn’t it? Because that brings the Empire into this. The answer is, I don’t know. Somewhere along the line, he talked someone into something.”
“Yep,” said Vlad. He was quiet for quite a while then—maybe a minute. Then he said, “And that someone screwed up and then tried to cover himself. And I think ... yeah, it all fits, I’m afraid.”
“What does?”
“Here’s what I think happened—no, on second thought, I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to for the last couple of days, and see if you can put it together.”
“All right,” I said. “Go to it.”
Let me think now. When did you leave? A lot has happened since then. It was early afternoon, right? Okay, I’ll just take it as it happened.
After you left, I made an effort to get Savn talking again, and he went off on knives some more. I decided that it probably wasn’t healthy to keep him fixated like that, and the old woman told me the same thing a few minutes later, so that was about it. I couldn’t think of anything else to do with him, and eventually I realized that half the reason I wanted to was to avoid having to do something I was a bit afraid of. Let me explain.
I kept thinking about that banker, and what you’d said about the Jhereg connections, and what I couldn’t get away from was the idea that, if the Jhereg was connected to Fyres, and Fyres was connected to the Empire, then the Jhereg was connected to the Empire. If that was true, what was the connection, and how did it work, and like that? Now Side-Captain Vonnith—what’s a side-captain, by the way?—must have been tied into Fyres because she’d jumped ship, so to speak, within a week of Fyres’s death, and you’d proven that she was connected to the Empire, so I couldn’t help wondering if she was connected to the Jhereg, too.
The trouble was, I couldn’t go waltzing into Stony’s office and ask about it, because he’d kill me on the spot and because you’d be annoyed with me, which meant I’d have to work through either Vonnith or Loftis. From what you said, I had the impression that Vonnith would bolt if she got any more jumpy, and that might be inconvenient, so that left Loftis.
Loftis.
I have to tell you, Kiera: I wasn’t all that excited about going up against him straight, and I wasn’t very happy about trying to put anything past him again. You’ve met him, too, and you know what I’m talking about—I think we were both lucky the first time we ran into him.
The only thing I could think of was to keep him off balance long enough for me to learn what I needed to learn, and, with him alerted, I didn’t think much of my chances of shoving another barrel of lies at him. To the left, however, telling him the truth wouldn’t get me anywhere. So that left giving him some of the truth, and either feeding it to him a bit at a time—trading information, in other words—or hitting him with enough of the truth to make him stumble, and hoping to get something while he was recovering his balance, if you follow my metaphor. As for which of those I’d do, I didn’t know—I was just going to approach him, talk to him, keep my ideas in mind, and see how it went.
That, at any rate, was the plan—if you can so dignify vague intentions with the word. After arriving at this magnificent conclusion, I had to make some food, and then clean up, and then try to talk to Savn about something other than knives, which produced no response at all. Unfortunately, after all of that, there was still time to visit Loftis, and I couldn’t find any more reasons for putting it off, and Loiosh was making fun of me, so I got myself dressed up as myself—that is, an Easterner, although not a Jhereg—and headed into town.