Dragon (Vlad Taltos) (3 page)

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Authors: Steven Brust

BOOK: Dragon (Vlad Taltos)
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Morrolan said, “Fentor, this is Baronet Vladimir Taltos. I know you are willing to work with Easterners, but are you willing to take orders from a Jhereg?”
Fentor said, “My lord?”
Loiosh said,
“What did he say?”
I said, “Errgh?”
Morrolan said, “I’ve just hired Lord Taltos as a security consultant. That puts you in his charge, under certain circumstances.”
I felt my mouth open and close. Morrolan had what? And when had he done this?
Fentor said, “That will not be a problem, my lord.”
“Good,” said Morrolan.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I …”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. A pleasure, Fentor.”
“The same, my lord.”
“Boss, you’ve just been hired.”
“Well, yeah. Recruited, actually.”
“You should tell him to never use this power in the service of evil.”
“I’ll be sure to.”
It occurred to me, also, that it was going to be harder, now that I was more or less working for him, to avoid trying to get the information he was after. Of course, maybe I’d get lucky, and no one would steal any of the weapons. Something made me doubt this.
Fentor bowed cordially to us both and made his exit.
I said, “Morrolan, what aren’t you telling me?”
“Many things.”
“In particular. I get the feeling that you aren’t just generally worried about someone stealing some random Morganti weapon.”
“You should trust your feelings; they seem to be reliable.”
“Thank you so much.”
He stood abruptly and said, “Come with me, Vlad. I’ll show you around and introduce you to a few people.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said.
I got up and followed him.
CROSSING LINES
Do you know what a battlefield smells like? If so, you have my sympathy; if not, you still won’t, because I have no intention of dwelling on it except to say that people don’t smell so good on the inside.
We stepped over the piles of dirt (I can’t call it a “bulwark” with a straight face) that we’d spent so much time and sweat creating, and moved forward at a steady pace; not too fast, not too slow. No, come to think of it,
much
too fast. A slow crawl would have been much too fast.
I adjusted my uniform sash, which was the only mark I carried to show which side I was on, since I’d lost my cute little cap somewhere during the last couple of attacks. About half of the company had lost their cute little caps, and many of the enemy had, too. But we all had sashes, which identified the side we were on, like the ribbons that identify sandball teams. I never played sandball. I’d seen Dragons playing sandball in West Side Park, alongside of Teckla, though never in the same game at the same time, and certainly not on the same team. Make of that what you will.
“Have you thought about getting up in the air and away from this?
” I asked my familiar for the fifth time.
“I’ve thought about it
,” he answered for the fourth (the first time he hadn’t made any response at all, so I’d had to repeat the question; we’d only sustained three attacks hitherto). And,
“How did we get into this, anyway?
” I’d lost count of how many times he’d asked me that; not as many as I’d asked myself.
We moved forward.
How
did
we get ourselves into this?
I asked Sethra, not long ago, why she ordered us to hold that position, which never looked terribly important from where I sat—except to me, of course, for personal reasons that I’ll go into later. She said, “For the same reason I had Gutrin’s spear phalanx attack that little dale to your left. By holding that spot, you threatened an entire flank, and I needed to freeze a portion of the enemy’s reserves. As long as you kept threatening that position, he had to either reinforce it or remain ready to reinforce it. That way I could wait for the right time and place to commit
my
reserves, which I did when—”
“All right, all right,” I said. “Never mind.”
I hadn’t wanted a technical answer, I’d wanted her to say “It was vital to the entire campaign.” I wanted to have had a more important role. We were one piece on the board, and only as important as any other. All the pieces wish to be, if not a player, at least the piece the players are most concerned with.
Not being a player was one of the things that bothered me. I was, I suppose, only a piece and not a player when I would carry out the order of one of my Jhereg superiors, but I had been running my own territory for a short while at that point, and had already become used to it. That was part of the problem: In the Jhereg, I was, if not a commander-in-chief, at least a high ranking field officer. Here, I was, well, I guess I was a number of things, but put them all together and they still didn’t amount to much.
But how
did
we get ourselves into this? There were no great principles involved. I mean, you judge a war according to who is in the right as long as you have no interest in the outcome; if you’re one of the participants, or if the result is going to have a major effect on you, then you have to create the moral principles that put you in the right—that’s nothing new, everyone
knows it. But this one was so
raw
. No one could even come up with a good mask to put over it. It was over land, and power, and who got to expand where, without even the thinnest veneer of anything else.
Those veneers can be important when you’re marching down toward rows of nasty pointy things.
Baritt died, that’s what started it all. And Morrolan convinced me to set up a trap to find out who would be likely to steal what I preferred not to come anywhere near. Kragar, my lieutenant in the organization, looked worried when I told him about it, but I’m sure even he, who knew Dragons better than I ever would, had no clue how it would end up.
“What if someone does steal one, and you find out who,” he said, “and it turns out to be someone you don’t want to mess with?”
“That, of course, is the question. But it seems unlikely to be a Jhereg behind it.”
“No, Vlad, it will be a Dragon. That’s the problem.”
Well, he was a Dragon; he should know. No, he wasn’t a Dragon, he was a Jhereg, but he should still know. He had once been a Dragon, which meant—what?
I studied Kragar. I knew him better than I knew anyone I didn’t know at all. We’d worked together as enforcers when I first entered the Jhereg, and we’d been working together ever since. He was the only Dragaeran I didn’t hate, except maybe Kiera. Come to think of it, I didn’t understand her, either.
Kragar was courageous, and timid, warmhearted, and vicious, and easygoing, and dedicated, and friendly, and utterly ruthless; as well as having the strange ability, or shortcoming, to blend into the woodwork so completely one could be staring right at him without realizing he was there.
I couldn’t remember a single idea of mine that he hadn’t thrown cold water on, nor a single one that he hadn’t backed me on to the hilt—literally, in some cases.
“What is it?” he said.
“I was ruminating.”
“Shouldn’t you do that in private?”
“Oh, is someone here?”
“You’re a riot, Vlad.”
“In any case,” I said, picking up the conversation from where it was lying in the middle of the floor, “there’s a lot of money in it.”
Kragar made a sound I won’t attempt to describe. I could sense Loiosh holding back several remarks. It seems I surround myself with people who think I’m an idiot, which probably says something deep and profound about me.
“So,” I said, “who do we put on it?”
“I don’t know. We should probably go over there ourselves and look things over.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
He gave me a puzzled glance that went away quickly. There are matters on which Dragaerans and humans will never understand one another, and soul-killing weapons are, evidently, one of those. I mean, they hate them as much as or more than we do; but Dragaerans don’t usually have the sort of overwhelming dread that such weapons inspire in a human. I don’t know why that is.
“How do we get there?”
“I’ll hire a coach.”
Baritt had lived in a square, grey stone building on the outskirts of Adrilankha, in the hills to the west. He probably called it a castle. I could call my tunic a chair if I wanted to. It had three stories, a large front door, a couple of servants’ entrances, a few glass windows, and a sharply sloped roof. His estate struck me as too rocky, and the soil too sandy, to be good for much. There was peasant activity, but not a great deal. There were a pair of guards in front of the main door, in the livery of the House of the Dragon. As Kragar and I approached, I saw one was wearing
the same emblem that Morrolan’s people sported; the other had a badge I didn’t recognize.
I rehearsed the conversation I was about to have with them. I won’t share it with you because the actual conversation disrupted my plans.
“Baronet Taltos?” said the one wearing Morrolan’s badge.
I nodded.
“Please enter.”
Trust me: The conversation I’d been prepared for would have been much more fun to relate. But there was compensation. The guard said, “Wait—who is he?” noticing Kragar for the first time.
“My associate,” I said, keeping my chuckle on the inside.
“Very well,” he said.
I glanced at the other guard, who was busy being expressionless. I wondered who he worked for.
Kragar and I passed within.
Rarely upon crossing a threshold have I been struck by such a sensation of entering a different world—I mean it felt as if between one step and another I had left Dragaera and entered a place at least as foreign as my Eastern ancestral homeland. The first surprise was that, after passing by the stone entryway of the stone house, you reached a foyer that was full of blown glass—vases, candelabra, empty decanters, and other glasswork were displayed on dark wooden pedestals or in cabinets. The walls were painted some color that managed to squeak in between white and yellow where no color ought to live, making everything seem bright and cheery and entirely at odds with any Dragonlord I’d ever met or heard of—and certainly with the Baritt I’d met in the Paths of the Dead.
My reverie was interrupted by Kragar saying, “Uh … Boss? Where are we going?”
“Good question.” Most sorcerers would work either in a basement, where it’s most reasonable to put any heavy objects they
might need, or up in a tower, where there is less risk of wiping out the whole house if something goes wrong. In Baritt’s case, probably some random room in a random place because it was convenient.
Loiosh moved nervously on my shoulder. We left the foyer and entered a sitting room of some sort, with more blown glass and decanters just like the others except full. On the wall to my left was a large oil of Baritt, looking imposing and dignified. There was a small door at the far end that should have led to the kitchen, and hallways heading off to the right and the left; one would presumably lead up a set of stairs to the bedchambers, the other to the rest of this floor. We took the one to the right and found a wide, straight stairway of polished white stone. We went back and tried the other hall, which looked more promising.
“Hey, Boss.”
“Yeah, Loiosh?”
“There’s something funny. I’m getting a feeling. It’s like—”
“We’re being watched, Vlad,” said Kragar.
“Not really surprising,” I said.
“I noticed first.”
“Shut up.”
“Ignore it, I think,” I told Kragar. “It would be odd if no one had any surveillance spells. Should we try that door?”
“The big ironbound one with the rune carved on it, barred by a pair of Dragonlords with spears crossed in front of it? Why should it be that one?”
“You’re funny, Kragar. Shut up, Kragar.”
“Who are you, and what is your business?” said one of the guards, standing like a statue, her spear not moving from its position in front of the door.
“You know both answers,” I told her.
She twitched a smile, which made me like her. “Yeah, but I have to ask. And you have to answer. Or you could leave. Or I could kill you.”
“Baronet Taltos, House Jhereg, on an errand from Lord Morrolan, and for a minute there I liked you.”
“I’m crushed,” she said. Her spear snapped to her side; her companion’s also moved, and the way was clear. She said, “Be informed that there is a teleport block in place around the house in general, and that it has been strengthened for that room.”
“Is that a polite way of telling me not to try to steal anything?”
“I hadn’t intended to be polite,” she said.
I said, “Let’s go.”
“After you,” said Kragar. Both guards twitched and then looked at him, as if they hadn’t noticed him before, which they probably hadn’t. Then they pretended they’d seen him all along, because to do anything else would have been undignified.
There didn’t seem to be any way out of it, so I pulled back the bolt and opened the door.
There’s a story, probably apocryphal but who cares, about Lishni, the inventor of the fire-ram. It seems he invented it out of desperation, having no other way for his flotilla of six cutters to escape a fleet of eight brigs and two ships of the line that had cut him off during what started as a minor action in one of the wars with Elde. As the story goes, after arming his cutters with his new invention, he went out, sank seven of the ten ships and damaged the other three, then, in another moment of inspiration, took his crews ashore, captured the Palace, and forced an unconditional surrender that ended the war right there. As he walked out of the Palace with the signed surrender in his hand, one of his subordinates supposedly asked him how he felt. “Fine,” he said.
As I say, I very much doubt it happened like that, but it’s a good story. I bring it up because, if someone had asked me how I felt when I walked into a room full of more Morganti weapons than I had thought existed in the world, I’d have said, in the same way, “Poorly.”
“Boss …
”
“I know, Loiosh.”
The weapons were piled everywhere. It was like stepping into a room full of yellowsnakes. I could feel the two Dragonlords behind me, and even the knowledge that I was showing fear in front of them couldn’t propel me forward.
“This is pretty ugly, Vlad.”
“Tell me about it, Kragar.”
“I wonder what he wanted them for.”
“I wonder why the Serioli invented them in the first place.”
“You don’t know, Vlad?”

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