Hawk (Vlad) by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online Page A

the sort of mind that can work with them. But I’ve always been concerned with fair. In a sense, that’s why I could do what I did for so long—it might not be justice to kill some poor son-of-a-bitch who was skimming from his boss; and it certainly made him and the boss unequal. But it always seemed fair to me. He knew the rules, he knew the risks.
    And, yeah, I’d broken the rules: I’d threatened the Imperial representative of the Jhereg and I’d testified to the Empire. But the fact is, I’d had no choice. Cawti was threatened. And I was scared and I was furious. I don’t know, it looks different from the perspective of years, but I still don’t see what else I could have done.
    So, yeah, there was that voice inside loudly howling that it wasn’t fair. Usually, I was too busy—or maybe I tried to keep myself too busy—to pay attention to it. But there, in that basement, staring at walls, it rolled over me from time to time.
    Oh, skip it; you don’t need to hear about it. I do apologize; my intention isn’t to make you listen to me complain. I know how wearying that is. But I’m also trying to tell you what happened, the whole thing, the why as well as the how; and that’s a piece of it, all right?
    I also considered the information I’d gotten about Lady Teldra. I mean, was I starving her by not letting her destroy souls? Should I, I don’t know, just go out and do that? I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think she’d want me to. It certainly explained why I wasn’t feeling better, though; I mean, why she’d only partly healed me. I’d drained her. I got the image in my head of one of those water-pulleys you see in the North: once the water has emptied out of them, they can’t lift any more until you fill them. I had never imagined Lady Teldra like that, but maybe she was.
    Which meant that I might need her to do something sometime, and she’d be unable to do it. That was not a comforting thought.
    I fell asleep and dreamed I was operating a water-pulley, then that I was in one. Dreams are stupid.
    My hostess brought bread and cheese from time to time, and once some tough peppery sausages, and more red mushrooms, which made me very happy (although my mouth raised some objections). Most of the time I did nothing, and tried very hard not to think. Loiosh spent a lot of the time just flying around the city; he was happier than he wanted to admit to know that, at least for a little while, I was pretty safe. I know I liked that part of it. No friends, no enemies, no gods; just four blank walls and the sound of my own breathing.
    Did it help? Yeah, I guess some. It seems like sometimes, if your body is wasted, ruined, falling apart, your mind is a bit more willing to accept doing nothing without going crazy. At least, sometimes. I think that’s what made it tolerable.
    What I wanted to do was take Lady Teldra, find as many high-up Jhereg as I could, and kill as many of them as possible before they got me. I wanted to do that very, very much. And there were certainly advantages to the idea: it was unlikely, if I made things that bloody, that they’d actually be able to nail me with a Morganti weapon; and just dying might be considered a win.
    Is it sad when dying is a win?
    The problem was Cawti and the boy; if I did that, then I had no doubt the Jhereg would go after them—before they got me, as a threat, or afterward, as revenge.
    I couldn’t do it.
    I sat in the room, relaxed, tense, angry, calm.
    So, what is it that sparked the idea? Was it frustration? Boredom? Anger? Dreams of water-pulleys? Half-conscious musing on fairness?
    I don’t know. Doesn’t much matter, I suppose. I’d like to say I dreamed it because there would be a certain charm in that, but I didn’t. I was doing a lot of sleeping, a lot of resting, a lot of nothing. I wasn’t even thinking that much about my predicament; or, rather, it would be more accurate to say I was doing everything I could not to think about it, just