I liked your method of finding a quiet place to talk, so I used it myself. When I’d located a suitable establishment, I paid for two rooms, across the hall from each other. The host probably wondered exactly what sort of bizarre activity I was going to engage in, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t volunteer the information. I found a kid to act as messenger and gave him a note to pass on to Loftis. The note said where I was, including the room number, and I signed it Margaret—I hope you don’t mind. Then I went into the room across the hall from the one I’d given him, and amused myself by talking to Loiosh, who was, by the way, waiting outside the building—I didn’t want to introduce that complication into things at this point, and I admit I was worried, because Loftis was potentially in touch with the Jhereg, and the Jhereg was looking for an Easterner with a pair of jhereg, so why take chances? The two-room bit, by the way, proved unnecessary. The idea was that if he decided to show up with a couple of additional blades, it would give me an edge to be behind him, but he had no such plans.
It took him about an hour and a half to get there, but eventually I heard him—that is, I heard one set of footsteps, and someone clapped outside the door. I moved the curtain back, and he turned quickly, and he saw me. Then he looked at me again, more closely, and I could see him start to put things together—Kaldor to the Easterner, the Easterner to Margaret, Margaret to the Empire, the Empire to Kaldor—and I took a certain pleasure in shocking him. I said, “I don’t like this place for conversations. Let’s walk. You lead.” Then, in spite of my words, I stepped in front of him and led the way out of the place. He followed.
“Anything?”
“All clear, boss.”
“Stay out of sight. I don’t know where we’re going, so—”
“I’ve done this before, boss. Honest.”
When we reached the street, I indicated that he should take us somewhere, and he set off in a direction where there would be less traffic. I didn’t want to give him too much time to think, so I said, “Margaret sends her regrets, but she was detained by the need to look into the Jhereg end of this—I assume you know about that?”
“Who are you?”
“Padraic,” I said.
“And you’re working with Margaret, is that it?”
I shrugged. “Things are happening faster than we’d thought they would, especially on the Jhereg side.”
“What is the Jhereg side?”
“Don’t play stupid, we don’t have time for it. Vonnith is ready to bolt, and Shortisle is getting jumpy.”
“Getting jumpy?”
“All right, getting even more jumpy. How soon can you close up shop?”
“We can finish tomorrow, if you don’t care about everyone figuring out that we didn’t run a real investigation. Now, I want to know—”
“I don’t care what you want to know,” I said. “What did Timmer say? Has she put it together?”
He fumed for a moment, then said, “If she has, she isn’t saying anything.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s probably wise.”
“How is it,” he said grimly, “that you, that an Easterner, came to be involved in the security of the Empire?”
“Perhaps,” I said, giving him a smile that was almost a leer, “Her Majesty doesn’t have the same feelings about Easterners that you do.” He scowled. He’s heard the rumors about Her Majesty’s lover, too, but perhaps hadn’t believed them. But then, I’m not sure if I believe them, either. Before he could come up with an answer, I said, “Are you aware how high this goes?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I wished I knew. “All right, then. No, don’t make it obvious, but hurry it up. Get your work done as fast as you can and get out.”
He held up his hand in a signal to stop, and he began looking around. I did, too, and didn’t see anything. The area we were walking through was almost empty of traffic and anything else—there were a couple of closed shops, a couple of houses with boards across the door, and a scattering of places that looked lived in. I said, “What is it?”
“Nothing special.”
I looked around again, but still saw nothing except a desolate neighborhood, of which I’d seen plenty in South Adrilankha. I said, “Where are we?”
“I just wanted you to see this.”
“What?”
“This area.”
“What about it?”
“Look.”
I’d been looking, but now I looked closer, and realized that the paint was new on most of the buildings and houses, and, furthermore, the houses, though small, looked like they’d been built for one family, and they were still in good condition. In fact, very good condition for how few people were here. I gave him a puzzled look.
He nodded. “When I got to town, just a couple of weeks ago, that place was open, and that place was open, and there were people living there, there, and there.”
“Where are they now?”
“Gone,” he said. “Maybe on the street, maybe moved to another town, maybe out in the woods hunting and living in tents. I don’t know.”
“Two weeks?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Fyres?”
“Yeah. The bank closings, and the closing of the three shipbuilders—”
“Three shipbuilders?”
“Yeah. He had a stake in about six or seven, and in three cases it was enough to shut them down. This area was developed about three hundred years ago by Sorenet and Family, Shipwrights, and pretty much everyone who lived around here worked for them. Some Orca, some Chreotha, mostly Teckla just in from your favorite village a generation ago. Now Sorenet is gone, and so is everyone who worked there.”
“I’ve never seen a neighborhood die so quickly,” I said.
“Nor have I.”
We started walking again. “You’ve surprised me in another way,” I said. “I hadn’t been convinced that Fyres was ever involved in anything real at all.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t, either. I still don’t know how involved he was, or why, or what the mechanics are. That’s the sort of thing we’d be finding out, if we were really doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”
This neighborhood seemed about the same as where we’d stopped. It was making me nervous. Loiosh, who was staying out of sight behind me, reported that nothing terrible was about to happen. I said, “Do you really think you can keep the Tiassa from finding out what you’re up to?”
“Probably,” he said. “He won’t check on us—he trusts us.” There was enough bitterness in that remark to ruin a hundred gallons of ale.
I said, “It isn’t like you had a choice.”
“I could have resigned.”
“And done what? And what would you have told the Tiassa when he asked you why? And on top of it, you’d have known someone else was doing it, and probably bungling it—frankly, I don’t trust your man Domm.”
“The lieutenant’s all right,” he said quickly. “He has a bit of Waitman in him, but that just means he’ll lose a few times before the Stand at Spinning Lake, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Waitman got an Imperial title for that, which isn’t bad for someone with that sort of disposition.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And please don’t explain. The point is, they knew just how to put the screws in.”
“Sure,” he said. “And who to put them to.”
In case you’ve missed it, Kiera, I was now the one who was off balance; while showing me around the neighborhood, he’d had a chance to do some thinking, and now it was me who wanted some time to sort things out.
We had apparently sold Loftis on our story far more completely than I’d expected to, and that puzzled me. But more than that, I just couldn’t reconcile everything he was saying with the idea that he was the sort of guy who’d go in for this kind of action. There was a piece of this—a big piece of this—that didn’t make sense, and I was no longer at all sure how to proceed. I had this awful urge to just flat out ask him everything I needed to know, like, for example, who was behind this, and how exactly had the pressure been brought; but someone like Loftis is going to figure out more from the questions you ask than you will from the answers he gives, and if he figured out too much, he’d stop answering the questions at all. A damned tricky business, that made me long for the days when all I had to do was kill someone and not worry about it.