Agyar by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online Page A

authorities at just the right time so they think they have their man, and then what they end up with is a body shot full of holes, or burned enough to be unrecognizable. Things don’t look good for your abode, Jim.”
    “So she’s out there setting it up right now?”
    “Probably.”
    He frowned very hard, the same frown, as if he were trying to think and it was an effort. In fact, thinking
comes pretty naturally to Jim. At last he said, “It seems like something that tricky, you could screw up for her pretty easy.”
    “In one sense, yes. There are many ways to disrupt it, the simplest being to leave.”
    “But then—”
    “But I can’t. She is who she is, and I am who I am, and orders are orders.”
    He squinted at me. “You don’t need to provide examples of the law of identity. I don’t understand why you can’t—”
    “Because I can’t. Drop it.”
    “All right, but couldn’t a friend of yours do it?”
    “What friend?”
    “Well, this Jill person you’ve been seeing?”
    “That’d be no different than me doing it.”
    “What about if I were to do something?”
    “Like what? What can you do? Shit, Jim, you can’t even pick up a piece of paper.”
    He winced at the obscenity and said, “I don’t know.”
    “Neither do I.”
    “So, what, you’re just going to wait for the ax?”
    Once more I had to stop and consider the question. I said, “I’m being very careful where I put my feet.”
    “What d’you mean?”
    “I mean that I have to watch where I go, where I’m seen in public, and who I’m seen with. If I were, for example, to kill someone, I’d better make sure there’s no one who can trace me to the killing. That kind of thing; trying not to make the job easier for her.”
    He shook his head. “Can you talk to her about it? She must have cared for you once.”
    “Cared for me?” I said. “Cared for me?”
    “Well, from what you said—”
    “You just don’t get it, do you? She doesn’t care for people the way you mean it. She—”
    “Hasn’t she ever?”
    I started to say “No, she never has,” but then I remembered that incident in London. This was before we left for the Continent, so everything was still young and fresh, and I was delighting in my life with her. On that occasion, I went to a cabaret hoping to meet her, and I saw her there, in one of the dark corners, talking earnestly to a young man. I was about to leave, but she caught my eye, and came over to me. We chatted about inconsequential things for a while, then I turned to go. She asked why I was leaving, and I said I thought she was busy. She said she was never too busy for me, and we left together. I never spoke about it, and I didn’t even think about it much, but I’ve never been able to make sense of it, unless, for a while, she really did care about me. I don’t know.
    Jim was looking at me and waiting for an answer as all of this went through my mind, so I said, “I don’t know, maybe she did at one time. But it doesn’t matter.”
    “I guess I just don’t understand,” he said.
    “I guess you just don’t,” I told him, which ended the conversation.
    I’m feeling sort of lazy, so I probably won’t go out any more today, unless this machine inspires me the way it did before. Thinking back, that’s still a little strange.
    There are a few boxes of books in the attic, and I spent some time digging through them. Old boxes of other people’s books are always interesting, even if the books themselves aren’t, and here there were a few that caught my eye, such as a 1933 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that I looked at for a while. It seemed to specialize in world history, and I was surprised at how much they got right. I also found ten volumes of “Great Orations,” published in 1899. They were in much worse
shape than the encyclopedias, but I allowed myself the luxury of a couple of hours with them.
    There were plenty of newer books, too, but I feel about books much the way I