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

for a while. I’d been there two days, and it was getting close to time to be on my way, which meant making a decision I wasn’t any closer to making. The knowledge that I was going to leave the place was stirring up a combination of anticipation and fear. Yeah, it would be good to be out, but. You know.
    In any case, that’s when it hit me. That’s when everything changed. Because if you are at the point where things are intolerable, and then suddenly you see a way to fix them, there isn’t a lot of question about trying it, no matter how crazy it seems.
    I was lying on my back, fingers clasped behind my head, staring at the rough texture of the ceiling, and then I drifted off, and then I remembered what Daymar had said on that long-ago evening. It wasn’t like I dreamed it, it was more like the memory woke me up. Does that make sense?
    Suddenly it was there, and then I paced the halls and pieces of a plan started falling into place. When enough of them were in place, I told Loiosh to find Daymar.
    *   *   *
    This was going to be difficult, tricky, probably futile, and certainly unpleasant. But all in all, not bad if you use cutting your own throat as the standard of comparison.
    I was pretty sure I could do the part that ought to be impossible.
    I was pretty sure I could sell the part I had to sell.
    But the issue, as it always seemed to be, was: repercussions. How could I protect myself and expose myself at the same time, when I didn’t know who exactly I’d be protecting myself from? And, if that turned out to be impossible, how could I find out who I needed to protect myself from?
    My grandfather, in teaching me the human style of swordsmanship, had said over and over that there was no way to control what your opponent did—that you had to be prepared for the guy to make any decision available to him, and be ready to respond. He was trying to make me understand the importance of being adaptable to changing circumstances. But the point is, he would repeat that there is no way to control your opponent’s actions. And then one time he added, “Except one.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Give him a perfect shot at your heart.”
    “But then I’ll be dead, Noish-pa.”
    “Yes, Vladimir. That’s why we don’t do it.”
    Well, okay, then. If you can’t control where the attack comes from, limit where the attack goes, right? Create your own opening, so that you’ve made your preparations for whoever charges into it. That might be feasible, if I were careful.
    It would take bringing some high-powered Jhereg together, and then running a game on them. There would certainly be sorcery. How to work around it? The amulet? No. Lady Teldra? Not the greatest sorcerer of all the weapons I’ve heard of, but still able to hold her own when needed.
    Only, yeah. I had to assume she wouldn’t be available. Was there any way to—yeah. It is much more difficult to enchant a living thing than a dead object—that’s why objects were teleported before they figured out how to do people, right? So that meant I could maybe find a way to do that .
    Or, wait. Hold it. Whole different idea. Castle Black? There would be a certain elegance in, just at the right moment, getting to Castle Black where the Jhereg wouldn’t dare touch me, or else put someone else in exactly the position I’d been in so many years before. Elegant and amusing, but no; there was another piece to it: Morrolan. I couldn’t put him in that position. At least, not if there was another way that had a reasonable chance of working.
    And there was a way. And it did have a chance of working. Maybe even a reasonable chance. If I could just figure out …
    Resources. I was going to need a lot of resources. Both the kind you hold in your hand, and the kind that walk and talk. The latter are always trickier. Who to call on? Cawti? No, I couldn’t drag her into this without also dragging in the boy, and that wasn’t going to happen.
    Kiera or Kragar, or both. Two